


Born Again When the World's Not Looking

by verdenal



Category: Supernatural, The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-25
Updated: 2012-07-25
Packaged: 2017-11-05 23:40:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 38,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdenal/pseuds/verdenal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas is Mulder, Dean is Scully, Skinner is Skinner, and nothing is ever that simple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wendigo

**Author's Note:**

> Since this is a fusion, chapters/episodes, characters, and plotlines are pulled from both shows. The title is from the X-Files, but telling you which episode would reveal too much.

Everyone in the bureau knows that Castiel is crazy. First off, his name is Castiel. No one has a name like that unless they’re crazy, or they were raised by crazy people, which amounts to the same thing. It’s rumored that he changed his name to Castiel, but even though they’re the FBI no one can seem to drum up any documents to support that. Second, he works in the basement. No one goes to the basement, and not just because the elevator doesn’t run there. It’s too hot in the summers and too cold in the winters, sort of clammy, and poorly lit. At least, that’s what Anna told Dean when she found out he’d been sent to the Pit. 

Really though, those two things are secondary to Castiel’s insanity. Even if he was named James and worked on the third floor he’d be the bureau lunatic. The thing about Castiel is that he works with the X-files, all the unexplained shit that no one really bothers with, and he loves it. He believes in all the cracked-out theories “eyewitnesses” have given about vampires and werewolves and bat-boy, probably.

Dean knows he really fucked up, but even super-double-secret probation or a huge fine would be better than having to work with Castiel. He actually met the man once, back a few years ago when he still worked aboveground. Castiel didn’t say more than a few dozen words the entire meeting, but Dean knows he’s a dick. Reading people is one of his strengths, and he knows that Castiel is a self-righteous asshole. Giving him his own department, no matter how hilarious it actually is, can only have made it work.

Which is why Dean is stalling, currently having his third cup of coffee with Anna. “Dean, c’mon. You can’t hide up here forever.”

“Can,” Dean mutters into his cup.

“Skinner’s going to notice eventually,” Anna tells him.

“What else could he possibly do?”

“Fire you.”

“Right, fine, okay,” Dean grumbles and gets up. Anna smiles encouragingly and points towards the stairs when Dean (maybe intentionally) heads for the elevator.

He doesn’t usually hide from things like this, but Dean really knows he really fucked up and he’d rather be out of the bureau than have people looking at him out of the sides of their eyes for the rest of his career. Working down in the basement with crazy Castiel isn’t exactly the best way to get people to treat you normally again. On the other hand, maybe he’ll look saner by comparison. He also gets to write his little spy reports on his own, so there’ll be plenty of opportunities to remind Skinner and the rest of the guys upstairs exactly how good Dean is at his job.

Wow. Even the door to the basement is shitty. The paint’s peeling and Castiel doesn’t even have a real sign on the door. To be fair, Dean doesn’t think anyone actually visits Castiel, but now he’s going to be working here, too, and he likes to think that at least Anna will stop by.

Castiel doesn’t move when Dean opens the door, just continues to stare at his computer with a staid intensity. The first the Dean notices is the one desk in the room. Apparently Skinner and Castiel think he’s going to sit on the floor. Maybe they’ll share a desk.

Castiel still hasn’t moved so Dean makes a sound in the back of his throat and finally gets some attention. All Castiel does is look at him and, fuck, he really looks like he works in a basement: his hair’s a mess, he doesn’t appear to have shaved recently, and his eyes have dark shades underneath them. 

“Yes?” Castiel’s voice is low and rough, like he hasn’t spoken in days.

“Dean Winchester. I’m…” Dean doesn’t quite know what to say he is, but clearly Castiel has no time for his muddling, since he cuts in.

“Yes. You’re assigned to work with me now.”

“You already knew?”

Castiel gives him a calm, level look that makes Dean’s hair stand on end. Also, it pisses him off. “Upstairs hasn’t completely forgotten my existence.”

“Then you know…” Dean would prefer not to bring this up, actually, but apparently Castiel knows more people upstairs than he expected, and Dean does want the two of them on the same page.

“Yes.” Then Castiel adds, “Don’t worry about your desk. I’m sure they’ll get that sorted out eventually. Now, come on, we’re going to Wisconsin. I already had to book a later flight because I didn’t know when you’d arrive.”

Dean follows him, silent because he actually can’t think of a response to Castiel’s downright creepy, if efficient, way of handling him. Dean doesn’t really like being handled at all, actually, but Castiel is grabbing his briefcase and handing Dean a plane ticket so he’ll have to shelve the complaints for now.

 

Castiel refuses to explain anything to him until they pick up their car in Wisconsin, at which point Dean is actively contemplating murder, or at least suicide. Anna had been wrong; this is awful. Finally, Castiel passes him a thick manila folder, which Dean opens to the autopsy report, and promptly closes again.

“What the hell happened to her?”

“Werewolf, maybe, but the lunar cycle isn’t right. Wendigo, probably. It could have been a hellhound, but I find that unlikely.”

Oh God. Dean’s working with a crazy man. He knew beforehand but it’s different like this, having the crazy jammed up in his face while he’s stuck in a moving car. He puts the folder in his lap, slowly. Sudden movements could startle Castiel and even though Dean has a few inches and ten-plus pounds of muscle on the guy, well, he’s a lunatic.

“Is this some sort of prank? Because if it is it’s a pretty shitty one. Werewolves, really? And a hellhound? C’mon, that sounds like something out of a videogame!” At some point Dean raises his hands to ward off Castiel, who’s only giving him one raised eyebrow, not even his full attention. Actually, Dean figures that’s a good thing, since Castiel is still driving through rural Wisconsin.

“Both of those options are, as I said, highly unlikely. It is almost certainly a Wendigo. If you had continued to read the file, you would have noticed that there have been three other victims in the past month.” Castiel lowers the eyebrow and maybe speeds up a bit, as Dean sheepishly takes his advice.

Oh. Well, Castiel had been right about the three other victims. They had all been found alive, within the same nature reserve. Dean’s never seen a bear do that much damage, but, then, he’s only ever seen one bear attack victim. None of them had survived long enough to give the police any actually useful information.

“None of them went alone, either,” Castiel remarks, offhand.

“We have autopsies for their companions?”

“Bodies were never found.”

Dean shuffles the papers around and tries to come up with a reasonable explanation, while Castiel stares fixedly ahead, his face so blank that Dean is absolutely convinced he’s being mocked. Castiel drums his fingers on the steering wheel and Dean resists the urge to turn on the radio and just blast the first classic rock station he can find. He settles for turning towards Castiel and asking,

“So, are you just going to walk in and let them know they have a Wendingo problem?”

“Wendigo,” Castiel corrects, “and no. I’m not going to suggest anything until we get to see the trails. I’m sure you’ve noticed that they were all hiking within the same ten-mile area.”

Of course Dean hasn’t, so he shuffles the papers some more, as though the sound will make him seem more useful than he, apparently, actually is. 

“And then?” He prompts. 

“Follow my lead,” Castiel suggests.

 

Forty minutes later they arrive at Wyalusing State Park. Castiel takes the files from Dean as they walk to the park ranger’s office and for the first time in years Dean doesn’t take the lead. It’s actually a weight off his shoulders, after last month’s fiasco, but in place of that weight is another one, admittedly less crushing, but still a weight. He’s pretty sure Castiel is going to open his mouth and let crazy pour out, and the park ranger is going to call Washington and ask them if they actually sent agents up and Dean will never hear the end of it.

The ranger tells them to call him Brian. He’s a fresh-faced eager kid who just wants to know what the hell is killing people in his park. Dean itches to take over, because this is what he does best: people love Dean, people spill their guts to Dean because he’s just so damn charming. Castiel, on the other hand, has roughly a teaspoon of charisma in his entire body.

Which is why Dean nearly trips when Castiel smiles and starts to explain the Brian that, yes, it’s probably something like a bear, but there’s always the off-chance that something more sinister’s going on, so if they could just get out onto the trail that would be great, thanks.

Dean feels a little gypped. Apparently Castiel is capable of normal human interaction, when he wants. He raises an eyebrow at Castiel as Brian gathers a pack and leads them towards the trail. All Castiel gives him in return is that wide-eyed stare that Dean’s already tired of.

They don’t talk as they wind through the park, going deeper into the trees until Brian stops and says, “Here’s where we found Ally.” Sure enough, Dean sees a little marker stuck in the ground.

“We didn’t want to disturb the wildlife,” Brian explains.

“All the other victims were found further in, correct?” Castiel asks, and Brian nods. He pulls out a map and marks where the other three were found. Dean and Castiel exchange a look; the little xs are all clustered around what the map indicates is a dense clump of trees. It’s prime territory for something to be hiding, they silently agree. 

Brian sees what they’re looking at says, “We’ve never had bear sightings in the area, or anything like that. I’ve got a gun and knife in the pack, though, so I don’t see why we can’t check the area out. Just be careful.”

“Of course,” Castiel agrees. AS they set out again Dean jerks his head and Castiel and, with what may be the most subtle eyeroll Dean has ever seen, Castiel obliging pulls back a bit from Brian.

“So, these, Wendigo things,” Dean begins, and backpedals when he sees a triumphant gleam in Castiel’s eye, “not that I’m saying I believe in this crazy stuff, but if I did, how exactly would we go about killing one?”

Castiel’s definitely smirking. “Fire,” he tells Dean, “we’re going to try and light the thing on fire.”

“You mean you’re going to try and light your imaginary beastie on fire. I’m just going to shoot whatever comes at us.”

“Ah, yes,” Castiel sneers, and maybe Dean shouldn’t try and piss him off so much, “I can’t imagine why they were so eager to get rid of you, with that kind of thinking.”

“Don’t,” Dean starts, but he isn’t about to explain to Castiel what he can’t do, or why, so he just shakes his head and catches up to Brian.

“We’re about two miles out,” Brian informs him, casual, cheerful. Dean only grunts in response and that seals the silence until they reach their destination. It doesn’t particularly look like the lair of some fantastic creature. The undergrowth is thicker, but still as lush as the rest of the reserve, flowering under an unusually pleasant May. Then Castiel catches Dean’s eye and cups his ear, and that illusion shatters. No birds are singing, hell, there’s not even the sound of squirrels in the trees. So maybe something’s off, Dean admits, but his shrug lets Castiel know that he doesn’t think it’s anything supernatural. All of them do ease their guns out, though, and Dean wishes he had brought something a little more useful than a handgun. At least Brian’s packing a shotgun, an old clunker like the ones Dean’s grandfather had kept, back in Kansas, but still liable to blow the head off anything that messed with them.

When something rustles the bushes, off to their right and only a little bit away, as far as Dean’s awesome directional hearing can tell, all three of them turn towards it slowly. Dean’s half expecting a bird or small rodent, but then he can see the branches moving and nothing is there.

Brian’s obviously as spooked as Dean is, since they’re doing the same strange backwards shuffle as they try to both keep their guns pointed in the things’ general direction and get out of there as fast as they possibly can. Castiel, too, is backing up, more wary and less panicked, at least to look at him.

Dean doesn’t see it coming, not just because whatever has decided to hunt them is invisible, but because it can also, apparently, move faster than any human or animal Dean’s ever seen. Well, seen isn’t the right word, but that’s irrelevant because during the three seconds when Dean can’t find the thing it somehow gets behind them and then Brian screams and he’s gone.

They don’t talk about it until they’re out of the woods and the Dean wheels on Castiel. “What the hell was that?”

“A Wendigo.”

“Thought you knew how to handle those,” Dean gripes and Castiel doesn’t look at him when he replies:

“In a strictly academic sense.” It must be Dean’s imagination, but Castiel sounds almost embarrassed. He’s certainly avoiding eye contact with Dean, and continues to ignore him for the rest of the way back to the ranger station.

When they arrive at the empty station Castiel has to talk to Dean, since there isn’t anywhere to go but the car, and Dean manages to get himself squarely in Castiel’s way, and even though Castiel’s crazy Dean’s revised his opinion on whether or not he could take the guy in a fair fight. 

“Look,” Castiel says, with his hands up, palms towards Dean like that will stop whatever Dean could throw his way. “I didn’t expect it to move quite that fast. Or be invisible,” he mutters.

“I thought you knew what was going on.”

“I don’t actually spend all my time hunting monsters,” Castiel snaps. “It may have escaped your notice, but I’m not exactly upstairs’ favorite person in the world. This is the first time in four months that I’ve gotten my expenditures approved, and I can’t afford to fly around the country every time some brain-addled witness claims they saw aliens!”

“Alright, Cas, Jesus, calm down. Can I call you Cas? Castiel’s kind of a mouthful.”

“I suppose.” Cas shrugs and narrows his eyes.

“So, Cas,” Dean leans on the syllable, something normal if effeminate in this sea of insanity, “what’s the plan?”

“It’s getting dark, so I don’t think there’s anything more we can do here. Not now, anyway.”

“But tomorrow?”

“Wendigos often keep their prey for weeks or months before feeding. Brian is, in all likelihood, still alive. Some of the other missing persons may be as well.”

That perks Dean up, and he doesn’t even mind when Castiel refuses to acknowledge his silent grab for the keys. Though they don’t talk all the way to the diner, or through dinner, Dean doesn’t mind.

 

At the Wild Duck Motor Inn, which Dean thinks sounds like something from a bad TV show, he manages to get the bed closest to the door. Maybe he’s a bit too quick on the uptake there, because Cas raises an eyebrow at him and he’s forced to explain. “Enough years in Violent Crimes and you get pretty paranoid, Cas. Not like you’d know anything about that.” He’s rewarded with the quirk of Castiel’s lips.

“Did all those years teach you how to make a flamethrower?”

“What?”

“We’re going to have to burn the Wendigo somehow, Winchester.”

“Right, right. But a flamethrower, really?”

“Any better ideas?” Dean thinks it over, silently. “Didn’t think so.”

“Wait,” Dean says before Castiel can start taping lighters to guns or whatever the hell he thinks constitutes making a flamethrower. “The ranger station would have flares, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” Castiel agrees, very slowly, like he’s still thinks even as he’s talking. “I don’t know if those would work, though.”

“Why not? They’d sure as hell light something on fire.”

“I suppose.” Cas pulls a face and Dean mentally notes that maybe some people aren’t actually cut out for facial expressions. “I don’t like it, but I don’t know if we have another option.”

“Not anything safe, anyway. Flamethrowers can get away from you pretty easy.”

“You sound as though you speak from experience.”

“Who says I don’t?” Dean realizes, startlingly enough, that he’s smiling. Yes, everything has gone to hell in a lovely, invisible handbasket, but he has missed actually having a rapport with someone. Anna was the last person he’d worked with that he actually liked, and then she’d gone and had her personal epiphany and spent a year in the basement and then got herself moved to some shady accounting job that Dean’s never gotten an adequate explanation for. So, yeah, maybe this won’t be so bad after all. 

Then he looks over and Castiel is holding a lighter in one hand and a can of bug spray in the other and Dean remembers that he’s working with a crazy person.

“Bad idea, Cas.”

“Like the flare is any better.”

“Yeah, actually, since that was made by professionals. This is just going to light your shirt on fire. And, yes,” he says when Castiel opens his mouth, “that’s exactly what happened to me when I was thirteen and thought it’d be a great idea to make my own flamethrower. We’re using the flares.”

Cas raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything as he puts down the can and the lighter.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this thing stashes people underground somewhere.”

“Yes,” Cas says, nose scrunched up in puzzlement, “how’d you know?”

“Really, Cas? You’ve never seen a horror movie? Shit like that’s always hidden somewhere dark and creepy.”

“Horror movies are often grossly inaccurate.”

“Point. Mind if I grab first shower?”

Castiel shakes his head without looking up, and when Dean gets out of the shower he’s still bent over something on the little table they’ve been given. Dean creeps up behind Castiel and peers over his shoulder. It’s a map of the park, with marks added where each of the victims was found.

“I don’t think they included secret monster caves on that map, Cas.”

Apparently Cas hadn’t heard him come up because his whole body goes tense and Dean can’t help but laugh. At that Cas does turn to face him, and Dean gets possibly the coldest stare he’s received yet from Castiel. He just claps them man on the shoulder and shrugs. 

“I’m just messing with you, you know.”

“I suppose,” Cas hums. Dean rolls his eyes and pulls down the sheets on his bed. 

“Try not to leave the light on for too long, will you? I can only assume we’re getting an early start.”

 

They do. Cas wakes Dean up at five thirty with a hand on his shoulder. Not a shake or a punch or anything, just the subtle weight of Castiel’s hand against Dean’s arm. It’s pretty freaky, when Dean thinks about it. He doesn’t get a chance to think about it until he’s in the car, clutching a cup of coffee and letting Castiel drive because in addition to being a kind of actual crazy person he’s also a loves-mornings type of crazy person. 

Mercifully, Cas doesn’t talk until Dean finishes his coffee and is capable of opening both of his eyes all the way, and then he just starts rattling off their attack plan in this perfectly flat voice, like Dean’s just going to go along with whatever comes out of Cas’s mouth.

He really is intending to complain or at least offer some constructive alternatives, but Castiel’s plan sounds like the best they’ve got: go in as soon as they can, armed with flares and regular guns, trying to keep an eye on each other’s backs and find the cave as soon as possible, save anyone who’s still alive and maybe kill the wendigo in the process. Dean shrugs his agreement and Castiel raises an eyebrow.

“That’s it? You don’t have any…constructive comments to add?”

“Nope,” Dean grins, and when Cas looks only half convinced, he adds, “that sounds like our best option, Cas, really.”

“I’m glad you approve.”

Dean can’t really get a read on the sincerity of that last statement, and the next few minutes pass in what, to Dean, at least, is an incredibly awkward silence. They’ve still got twenty or thirty miles to the park, and while Dean thinks they can pull the whole thing off, if they do die he doesn’t want to go out with his last day on earth having been one long awkward pause. “So, Cas, tell me about these wendigo things.”

“You want to know?”

“If I’m going to kill it, I might as well know what it is first.”

“Wendigos,” Cas starts, and Dean can hear something warm and excited in his voice, “in legend, at least, were once humans who consumed human flesh.”

“Cannibals.”

“Yes. As a sort of divine punishment,” here Castiel’s mouth quirks in a strange way, “they became…warped. In their current form, they are symbols of human greed.”

“How so?” Dean asks, and is surprised to find himself genuinely interested.

“Wendigos capture and kill far more prey than they can eat at any one time.”

“Then we’re probably going to find our missing persons still alive?”

“I believe so,” Cas tells him with the ghost of a smile.

The rest of the ride is silent, but in no way uncomfortable, and Dean is content to watch miles of flat, Wisconsin earth roll by them. When the sign for the Wyalusing State Park looms ahead of them, though, a knot settles in his stomach.

He and Cas still don’t say anything even as they gather all the flares in the ranger station and double-check the map, and once they’re on the trail even Dean and his sort-of motor mouth know that their silence is among the only things keeping them alive.

The whole thing goes almost too smoothly for Dean’s taste. He finds the entrance to the cave, which is more of just an underground lair, hidden behind some particularly think bushes, and he and Castiel are halfway through untying the three people they find still alive (Brian, a man in his early thirties, and a teenage girl) before they even hear the wendigo.

The next thing Dean knows he’s being thrown against the wall of the place, surprisingly hard for what looks like really well packed dirt, and Castiel’s being held up in the air by something he can’t see. Then a gunshot rings out and there’s a scream that sounds like nothing else Dean’s ever heard and a bright, bright light and someone helps Dean to his feet. 

It’s Brian, goofy smile still intact, even if his eyes are a little haunted and the hand he offers Dean shakes. “Thanks,” he says, and they both have to laugh at how normal a thing that is to say after what has just happened.

“Everyone okay?” Dean asks, then, turning to the rest of the people in the cave, the two other missing people, both of whom look a little malnourished but basically alive, and Cas, who’s slowly herding them towards the entrance.

By the time they get back to the station, they’ve hammered out some bullshit cover up that mostly relies on Brian’s abilities to bullshit about deviant wildlife and the general public’s willingness to accept trauma as an excuse for the other two, Mark and Amy, not saying a word. Castiel, of course, informs Dean that he is going to tell their superiors the truth and nothing but the truth.

“Not the whole truth, though, Cas?” Dean asks as they stand by their car, waiting for the ambulances to drive off. 

“I feel some parts of that account could be neglected.”

“Like the part where you singed your own eyebrows?”

“They’re still there,” Cas mutters. “And I was going to leave out the part about you getting tossed about like a ragdoll, Winchester, until you said that.”

“Dean’s fine. And since your memory’s gone so spotty, I better drive. It could be a concussion,” he says, with a wink and a grin even he would describe as shit-eating.

Cas raises an eyebrow, but he hands over the keys.

 

Castiel eats lunch in his office, and while Dean no longer thinks he is a raving madman, he also doesn’t think they’re quite at a lunch-eating level of friendship. (Also, no desk. Cas claims he ordered one the day he heard he was getting a partner, but he gets all shifty when Dean mentions moving around some of the clutter to make room, so Dean treats his desk like every other mystical creature Cas mentions.) Instead, he heads upstairs to find Anna.

He and his sandwich find her in her office with a salad and a stack of papers roughly as tall as she is. “Hello, stranger,” he drawls. She grins when he takes shifts half of her papers to the floor and takes the extra chair.

“Me, the stranger?” Anna laughs. “You’re the one who hasn’t been up here for two weeks. Is Castiel so fascinating that you’d forget all about me?”

“Jealous?” Dean asks with a smirk. “Nah, Skinner and the big guys have been riding my ass. Haven’t had much time off.”

“They didn’t like your report?”

“Not any more than I liked writing it.”

“What did you say?” Anna asks, and leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees.

“Obviously not what they wanted to hear,” Dean grouses.

“Well, come on, tell me what you wrote,” she presses.

“That what we killed in that cave wasn’t like any creature I’d ever seen before.”

“Oh.” Anna’s eyes go wide and for a moment Dean thinks she’s going to call him crazy. “Yeah,” she goes on, “I can’t imagine they’d like hearing that the lunatic in the basement isn’t.”

“So you believe me?” Dean asks, breathless. For a moment he wonders if this is how Castiel feels every time he opens his mouth.

“I did work down there for a few months,” she reminds him. “I know that Castiel isn’t what everyone wants him to be.”

“No, he’s worse,” Dean chuckles, and Anna rolls her eyes.

“Be careful,” she says as he rises to leave.

“Always am.”

“I mean it, Dean. Be careful.”


	2. Young At Heart

“Cas,” Deans says as he bursts into the basement office, “we can’t take that sketchy abduction case in New Mexico. I know you wanted to visit Roswell and get a little alien toy, but that’ll have to wait. I’m sure you have vacation days stored up.”

The noise Cas makes in the back of his throat qualifies for petulant in Dean’s universe, but he still doesn’t look up as he asks why.

“Something came up, upstairs. They, ah, need me to help out with a case.”

“They need you to help out.”

“Have a little faith, Cas,” Dean laughs. “They may have kicked me out, but I did some pretty damn good work while I was there.”

“Really,” Cas says, dry.

“Look, I’m sorry. I really am, but this is something I have to do.”

“Dean,” Cas sighs, and, yeah, he does always have this five o’clock shadow and ridiculous, dark bags under his eyes and Dean feels bad for giving him trouble, sometimes, but not this time. “I don’t mind, really. I would prefer if you explained,” he leans on that word, “since I can’t go off to New Mexico, or anywhere else, without some sort of backup.”

“Right, yeah, of course.” Dean was sort of hoping Castiel would just make the same long-suffering expression he always makes when Dean does something he thinks is particularly stupid, because his time in Violent Crimes is probably his second-least favorite topic of conversation, ever. “I guess I should point out first that they didn’t want to ask for my help on this case, but, uh, it was insisted upon.”

“Skinner?”

“I wish. No, it was the perp, actually.” Cas looks up at that, giving Dean the full intensity of his stare.

“You heard about the robbery yesterday, right?”

“If I recall, it was unnecessarily violent.”

“That’s kinda the guy’s m. o.”

“The one that got away?” Cas asks. Dean twists his face in amusement and displeasure, but shakes his head.

“Not at all. I was head of the operation that put him behind bars, actually. As far as the records show, he died in jail.”

“But he robbed a jewelry store last night.”

“Apparently,” Dean snorts. “It may be a copycat, but if it is, then it’s the best damn copycat I’ve ever seen.”

“Security cameras show anything?”

“Wow, Cas, you do remember how to work a real case,” Dean jokes, tempted to ruffle Castiel’s hair, but then Cas gives him a look and he reevaluates that idea pretty quickly. Sobered, though, he continues, “Yeah, the camera’s got the guy, but not very well. From what we can tell, though, it’s not a copycat.”

“Really?”

“Looks like my old friend,” Dean grimaces, “come back from beyond the grave. That’s why I figured I’d bring you in. This is right up your alley.” 

“Right up my alley?” Castiel asks, with some sort of expression playing around his lips. A smirk, Dean thinks, given how unenthusiastic Cas looks about the whole endeavor. 

“Well, rising from the dead isn’t exactly natural. I figured you’d have something about it in the x-files.”

“Dean,” Cas grinds out, in that long-suffering tone that really does make Dean resolve to learn more about the x-files, or at least cut down on his ribbing, or buy Cas a cup of coffee, or something, “rising from the dead is far from a common supernatural occurrence.”

“Even if we’re talking zombies?”

“Did the man on the tape look like a zombie?”

“No,” Dean sighs. “He was moving like a normal human.”

“Then unless we have another reason to suspect it, I’m saying no zombies here.”

“One day,” Dean tells him, “one day we’re going to get to fight zombies.”

“I’m sure,” Cas agrees, “and then you’ll see how absolutely awful it is.”

“Whoa, wait. Cas, you’ve fought zombies?”

“Not personally,” he admits, “but I’ve spoken with people who have.”

Dean snorts, but lets it go. “So, no hope from the mystical filing cabinets, then?”

“I’m afraid not. Things like that don’t wind up in the x-files too often.”

“Like what?”

“Genuine miracles,” Cas says. He’s turned back to his computer, but Dean thinks he sees a flush on Cas’s cheeks.

“So you really believe in that stuff, then.”

“In what stuff?” This is the side of Castiel that Dean is most comfortable with: prickly and precise and sort of exasperated with Dean in a general way.

“Miracles, will of God manifest, etcetera, etcetera, the guys upstairs said you did, but I thought they were exaggerating.”

“What’s so strange about believing in God?” Yeah, Cas has a definitive flush high on his cheeks and he’s definitely not actually doing anything on his computer. His hands are still and rigid on the desk.

“Nothing, really,” Dean starts, and almost leaves it at that, but he’s having a fucking horrible day and since Dean is sort of an emotional retard, or at least Anna had told him he was as she was ending their three-week sort of relationship thing, and, okay, maybe she had a point, but Dean’s never given it too much thought, he keeps going, “but, really, Cas? Resurrection and all that? It’s a nice fable and all, I mean, I went to church as a kid, but, come on.”

“I take it you’re not a religious man,” Cas says, and Dean’s not so stupid that he doesn’t get that Cas would rather drop the subject of his personal beliefs. Fine, Dean will give him that; he had been raised with the ‘no sex, no politics, no religion’ rule of conversation, anyway.

“No,” he agrees, “not anymore.” At the tilt of Cas’s head he answers with, “It was the job. You know I used to be up in Violent Crimes. Guess my faith wasn’t strong enough to make it through what you see in there.”

“I can only imagine,” Cas murmurs.

“Don’t worry about it.” Dean shrugs and moves towards the door.”I’ve already been down here too long; there’s something Skinner said I’d want to see in forensics. You’re, uh, you’re free to come if you want.”

“I think I will,” Cas says.

 

Skinner, as always, is right. There is something in forensics Dean is very, very interested in: a handwriting analysis. “Burnett left a note,” he explains to Cas as the agent supposed to explain the results to them hunts through a stack of papers on her desk for something, “which mentions me.”

“And that’s why they called you in?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and everything else gets cut off as the agent resurfaces with an apologetic smile. 

“Here we go,” she says. “Now, this is really interesting. We were able to compare the note received last night with one he left five years ago.” She gestures for Dean to come next to her. “See here, the deeper indentation on the ‘W’ or your name, since he’s applying more pressure, and here,” she gestures to something else and Dean does tune out a little. This stuff is important, but Dean has never really had the head for cold, hard analysis of anything, really. He prefers action.  
“The gist of this is, well, I’ll show you.” She shoves the two notes underneath Dean’s nose. “Look, they’re exactly the same. Exactly, every word they share is written in exactly the same way.”

“Then it’s Burnett, no question?”

“Well,” she purses her lips and Dean’s heart sinks. “Here’s the thing. It’s been five years, so Burnett would be in his forties, and jail ages you more than normal life. His handwriting would have changed just a little to reflect that, but it hasn’t.”

“A copycat,” Dean mutters, the bridge of his nose pinched between forefinger and thumb.

“Maybe, but the similarities are so striking that it’s highly improbable to think that someone caught every little detail of Burnett’s writing.”

“So,” Dean draws the word out, thinking over the long vowel, “either we have the greatest copycat I’ve ever heard of, or Burnett hasn’t aged in five years.”

“Roughly,” the agent admits, sweeping hair behind her ear and adjusting her glasses. She’s so clearly new at all of this and so eager and nervous that Dean manages to reel in his exasperation and sarcasm. He’ll save it for Skinner, who probably saw the handwriting results as soon as they came out and has been waiting to dump the entire problem in Dean’s lap.

In the hallways, Cas presses in close and says to Dean, low, “I have a couple theories, when we have time.”

“Sure, Cas,” Dean agrees, but he mentally shrugs the whole thing off as they walk in to Skinner’s office, and the secretary waves them through.

Skinner is behind his desk, reading some report, and an older man is smoking quietly in the corner. He’s been there before when Dean and Castiel gave their reports. Dean doesn’t know his name, has never heard him speak, and has never seen him do anything but smoke. The man makes Dean nervous under his skin, deep in his bones. 

“You’ve already seen the handwriting analysis,” Dean tells Skinner, before the AD can even get a “hello” out.

“Yes. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Dean admits, teeth gritted. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone else working on the case yet.”

Skinner raises his eyebrows. “You were singled out by name, Winchester, so I hope you get an opinion soon, or it’ll be your ass, and mine, on the line.”

Dean nods and bounces on the balls of his feet, thinking of a response that doesn’t make he seem like an idiot or a complete pussy when Cas decides that they do, in fact, have time now.

“It’s Burnett,” Cas declares, and Dean instinctively takes a step away from him, just in case crazy is contagious. This isn’t Cas’s normal brand of crazy, but a new and dangerous breed that involves making important assumptions about cases that have nothing to do with him and everything to do with Dean.

“Oh, really,” Skinner prompts, and the cigarette man is leaning forward now, smoke curling through the room. Dean keeps him in the corner of his eye, and shifts back towards Castiel.

“Burnett was far from a petty criminal, but he never received a huge amount of press, correct?” Cas asks, completely cool like he always is and Dean fights to keep his facial expression under control. If he can play it off like this was intentional, well, no point in jinxing the whole affair.

“Yes,” Skinner says.

“So it’s unreasonable that a copycat would emerge, five years later, let alone one with a perfect working knowledge of Burnett’s handwriting and the agent who worked the original case.”

Skinner only nods, eyebrows raised in surprise. The smoking man settles back a little and Dean relaxes. “Whose idea was it to lock you down there?” Skinner asks, finally, and while Dean can tell it’s meant to be complimentary he can practically see Cas’s hackles go up. Outwardly, of course, all Cas does is tighten his mouth a little.

“My own.” It’s practically a growl.

“We’ll head down to the main offices, then,” Dean jumps in, “and find the guys who’ve been working on this.” He actually grabs Cas by the elbow and steers him out of the office, not bothering to see Skinner’s reaction.

Out in the hallway Dean stops and jerks Cas to the side of the corridor.

“What the hell was that?” He makes an effort to keep his voice down, really, but the pair of agents walking by still turn their heads. Whatever, Dean thinks, everyone already knows Castiel’s a lunatic and he hasn’t exactly done anything to convince anyone of his own stability recently, either.

“I was only trying to help.”

“Cas, it’s not Burnett. How could it be, with what we know? Besides, he’s dead. This is ridiculous. Skinner’s going to have my ass, and yours, too.”

“It is Burnett,” Cas tells him, in the same calm, even way he said it in Skinner’s office, “and the man in the corner knows it.”

“The bastard with the cigarette?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Dean breathes out. “I can tell you’re gearing up for some epic, Area-51 level shit here, so let’s go find the agents in charge first, and you can drop this one on me in the basement.”

“Fine.”

 

The agents in charge, a couple of relative greenhorns, are more than thrilled to wash their hands of the whole situation. Dean takes their files, mostly stuff he’s already seen, minus a report from the cashier, who had miraculously survived the robbery, albeit with a couple of new holes, and trudges back downstairs with Cas.

He pulls up a chair and organizes the folders before he lets Cas start.

“Dean,” he says, “I know this may sound strange,” and Dean cuts him off right there.

“You think it might sound strange? Jesus, Cas, is it even worth hearing?”

Cas glares, but keeps on talking. “I chose to come down here for a reason, not solely because I was being punished, though I was. I voiced opinions that did not endear me to my superiors, and they thought it best to put me where I would not be found, or, rather, where I would not be listened to.”

Dean leans forward. Cas has never talked about himself in any other tense than the present; Dean still doesn’t even know his last name. This, right here? This is gold, prime information.

“What the hell did you say to your AD, then?” Dean prompts.

“The truth,” Cas says, and for a moment Dean thinks that’s all he will say, and he’s ready to jump up and shake Castiel until an explanation comes out, when Cas continues. 

“I rarely worked out in the field, unless it was strictly necessary. I did analysis mostly, research, non-medical forensics, that sort of thing. Cults were always a specialty of mine, though.” At that, Cas’s mouth twists up. “An old partner of mine was on a strange case, what appeared to be a series of ritual murders. I got asked to assist.” Cas pauses and some light goes out in his eyes. He looks down and Dean nearly reaches out to ask him to continue.

“The how is largely irrelevant,” Cas says, after a beat, “as is the why.”

Dean sighs and sits back.

“Burnett is possessed,” Cas tells him.

“Possessed?” It’s not quite the craziest thing Dean has ever heard from Castiel, but that doesn’t make it not crazy. “Like, Exorcist shit?”

“Yes,” Cas says, and Dean’s heart sinks, “and no.”

“Is it physically possible for you to give a straight answer?”

Cas ignores the question, but does explain. “He is possessed by a demon, but he is not likely to act in any way like Linda Blair.”

Christ Almighty, no one warned Dean that working for the FBI could be like this. Cas looks so sure of himself that Dean almost wants to believe that some demon is walking Burnett around D.C. for kicks or something, but he also can’t imagine that theory holding much weight back in Skinner’s office.

“I’ll believe it when I see some proof, Cas, you know me. Now come on, I want to interview that cashier before it gets too later.” He leaves without checking to see if Cas is following, but of course he is. 

 

The cashier is a pretty young woman with fake nails almost as long as Dean’s little finger. “You’d think she could have fought Burnett off with those,” he jokes to Cas.

“I doubt those nails have the strength to break human skin, especially not at that length.”

“Yeah, thanks for that, professor,” Dean gripes. 

Cas doesn’t have a response to that, so Dean approaches her. “Back at work already?” he asks, flashing a smile and piling on the Southern charm beaten into him by a childhood in Kansas.

“Police said they didn’t need me anymore,” she mutters, “and I need the cash.”

“Still,” Dean presses, “I bet that shook you up.”

“Well, yeah,” she says, “I mean, we get thugs round here all the time. It’s not a nice part of town, you know, and we have pretty expensive merchandise in here. Still, there hasn’t been a break-in since before I started working here. Last one was probably six years ago.”

“So, Loretta,” Dean smiles at her again, gives her name without looking down at her nametag, since he noted it before they started talking, “it wasn’t one of your regular thugs yesterday?”

“Oh no, not at all.” Loretta smiles at him now, and she’s a pretty girl, with thick caramel colored hair and bright brown eyes, almost Dean’s type but he’s on the job and Cas is hanging over the proceedings, like the specter of the responsibility Dean has every time he flashes his badge. “This guy, he really knew his stuff. It was like something off TV, the way,” here her voice gets very slow, in the way Dean has heard a million witnesses speak of things they only saw but did not truly experience, “he shot those people. It was very fast, and he only shot each of them once.”

“After he shot the customers,” Dean begins.

“And the manager,” Loretta interrupts, “poor Mr. Goldfarb. He normally isn’t out on the floor like that, but the one time he decides to leaves his office, well,” she shakes her head, “it’s such a shame.”

“It is,” Dean agrees, and touches her arm. “What happened after?”

“After that,” Loretta pauses, and Dean knows she’s going to take her sweet time telling this story, since it’s probably the greatest one she’ll ever have to tell, “that’s when he came up to me, and he made me give him the keys to the cases and everything in the cash register. He filled up his bag, God he looked like a TV villain with that bag, all he need was the moustache, and he came back up to me, and oh I thought I was just going to die of fright. Anyway, he pulls this note out of his pocket and tells me to give it to the police when they got here.” She shakes her head and shrugs. “It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, you know.”

“Strangest thing I’ve heard in a long time,” Dean agrees. He fishes in his pocket for the picture of Burnet he brought, and carefully unfolds it across the counter. “Do you recognize this man?”

“That’s him, all right,” Loretta agrees, “I’d know that face anywhere.”

“Well, thanks for your time, Loretta. You’ve been a great help.”

“Aw, thanks” she giggles. Dean thinks about getting her number and nearly asks, but then Cas clears his throat from the doorway, and Loretta shoves at his shoulder, saying, “Sounds like you better get back to work, yeah?”

“Suppose so,” Dean sighs and heads to the door, and then turns. “Here, let me give you my number, in case you think of anything else.” Before she can reply, Dean walks away.

“She IDed Burnett, didn’t she?” Cas asks as soon as they’re outside.

“She did,” Dean admits. “Says he was the strangest thing she ever saw. He asked her to give the note to the police, you know.”

“Really,” Cas says, dry. “She didn’t say he did anything else odd?”

“Not that she told me. I did tell her to call if she thought of anything else. Sometimes it takes people some time, after all.”

“Yes, it does,” Cas murmurs.

“So,” Dean says, clearing his throat, “did you find anything in the store?”

“I did,” Cas tells him, and his whole face brightens. He holds up a bag with some fine powder in it, a pale yellow.

“Hell’s that?”

“Sulfur, though we’ll have to give it to the lab to get it verified.”

“Sulfur? In a jewelry store?”

“Demons often leave behind a residue of sulfur.”

“Actual fire and brimstone?” Dean laughs.

“No fire,” Cas tells him, “just brimstone.”

 

Dean goes to Skinner’s office while Cas waits for lab results. Skinner’s alone, mercifully, though Dean inhales deeply to check for smoke before he speaks. Skinner sits with his hands folded, clearly impatient.

“The cashier gave a positive ID on Burnett,” Dean says.

“Burnett’s dead,” Skinner tells him.

“That’s not what was being said in this office just this morning.”

“As far as the FBI is concerned,” Skinner says, voice tight, “Burnett died four months ago, in a federal prison.”

“She said it was him, no doubt about it, and she wasn’t lying. What reason would she have to lie about that?”

“You tell me,” Skinner snaps. He sounds as on edge as Dean feels.

“The picture I showed her was from five years ago.”

“Burnett wouldn’t look anything like that now, Winchester.”

“That’s not what that handwriting analysis says.”

“I’m not denying that not all of the facts seem to make sense, but you’d be better off trying to figure out what this guy’s next target is going to be rather than trying to bring a dead man back to life.”

Dean leaves without another word.

 

Dean is watching TV late that night when his phone rings. 

“Winchester,” he growls into it.

“Agent Winchester, hey, this is Loretta from the jewelry store, you know?”

“Of course. What did you need, Loretta?”

“Well, you told me to call if I remembered anything. It’s not super important but I thought maybe you’d want to know.”

“Every bit helps, yeah.”

“It was just, when Burnett was talking to me, his eyes—just for a moment, like maybe a second— they got real dark. It was like looking at the devil, Agent Winchester. There was something evil in that man.”

Dean thanks her and hangs up. Sleep is a long time coming.

 

He blusters into Cas’s office two days later, furious. “Burnett hit another place last night,” he spits as he throws a folder down on Cas’s otherwise immaculate desk.

“What do you want from me? An apology?” Cas asks, and that takes the wind out of Dean’s sails pretty effectively.

“He left another note. Here,” Dean pulls it out of the file and angles it towards Castiel. Cas reads it, and looks up at Dean, his eyes wide.

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

“No reason he wouldn’t be,” Dean says.

“What are you going to do?”

“Try and beat him at his own game, I guess.”

“You’re just going to waltz into a major public venue, during an event, with an entire team and try to catch a violent criminal?”

“Well, Jesus, Cas, when you put it like that,” Dean mutters. “I was thinking of going in alone. Burnett’s made it pretty clear that it’s me he wants to see. I don’t need to risk anyone else’s life on this thing.”

“Just your own,” Cas snaps back. “That’s an absolutely ridiculous idea, and we both know it. You’re going to need backup, even if Burnett doesn’t get the best of you.”

“You really think he’s going to get me, huh?” Deans jokes, but underneath he wonders, maybe, if Cas knows something.

“Demons have an unnatural strength, Dean,” Cas tells him. “They can push human bodies beyond their natural capabilities, and they cannot be stopped in the ways a human can. They must be exorcized.”

“Tell me how to exorcize a demon, then, Cas, but I’m going alone.”

“Why?” Cas demands. Dean’s never heard him this angry before. Actually, he’s never heard him this animated ever, period. It would almost be touching, if it weren’t so annoying.

“Burnett and I have a history,” Dean says with a sigh, “and I’d rather see him alone.”

Cas only stares at him, and Dean knows he’s not going to get out of the room without explaining himself. Burnett had been one of Dean’s first big cases in Violent Crimes, back when he was in his twenties and thought he was pretty much invincible. He still thinks he’s invincible, but he’s older now, and with age come scars and failure, and those are things a lot like wisdom.

“I got Burnett behind bars, but I fucked the case up, big time.” Cas doesn’t say anything to that, so Dean continues. “He got a hostage and I froze. I didn’t know whether to shoot or not, I’d come up to him from the side and I had him in my sights, but the woman was too close to him and I froze for just a second.” Confessions sits thick in his throat, but Cas only leans towards him, and he wonders if maybe he should just get down on his knees, since this is the first and the last time he’s ever going to tell this story.

“I fucked up, and he shot her. You don’t survive a shot to the head at point-blank range. He got one of the other agents, too, but he pulled through.”

Cas makes a soft sound that is almost like ‘oh,’ and far too close to pitying for Dean’s comfort so he backs away and looks at the floor. “It was years ago, Cas, but neither of us has forgotten it, and he’ll be itching for a chance to put me in that position again. If I’m alone,” Dean trails off.

“He’ll only be able to shoot you, not another agent. It’s stupid.”

Dean will take being stupid over being pitiable any day. He rolls his eyes. “What do you suggest then, in your infinite wisdom?”

“At least take me along with you. I can perform the exorcism if you distract Burnett.”

“He won’t be expecting that?”

Cas pauses, and worries at his lip. “I don’t think so. The notes were all addressed only to you. And while I doubt Burnett was possessed without anyone on the prison staff knowing, they don’t seem to think anyone would have told you. Still, a small team may not be out of place.”

 

Dean takes Cas’s advice in the end, like he does every time Cas points out when he’s being stupid, because he usually is. He and Cas and a team of four undercover agents creep through the concert hall. It’s a huge place, gilded and bright and full of nooks and crannies Burnett could hide himself away in. Dean doesn’t even know what Burnett’s plan is exactly: a shooting, or a bomb, or maybe he’s going to steal a few of the chandeliers. They look like they’re worth more than Dean makes in a year, and he’s not quite a pauper. 

They split up; Dean makes sure he’s alone. On the second floor he thinks he sees someone move, but they’re too fast for him to get a good look. Everyone checks in with nothing, and Dean swears to himself. If Burnett is here, something’s wrong, he shouldn’t be able to hide this well, and if he’s not here Dean’s screwed anyway, since he’s undoubtedly hitting some other place at this very moment.

It feels like hours before his emergency walkie-talkie crackles and he hears Cas’s voice, soft, go “Fuck.” He’s never heard Cas swear before, and that, if nothing else, tells him that he should get his ass in gear. 

Burnett has squirreled himself away in some storage room, and because Dean’s life is shitty like that, he’s the first to get there, except, obviously, for Cas, who’s gagged and tied to a chair in the corner. Burnett himself stands in the middle of the room, limbs akimbo, totally unarmed. He’s even smiling, and Dean feels bad for only giving lip service to Loretta’s story of his strangeness. This isn’t, by a long stretch, the man he dealt with five years ago.

“Dean,” the thing in Burnett’s skin says, “it’s been so long.”

“You’re not Burnett,” Dean says, “you can’t be.”

“Can’t I? You’re looking right at me, after all.”

“Burnett’s dead, first off, and no way in hell he’d wait in the middle of a room, unarmed, for me to come find him.”

“Even with a hostage, big boy? You never were very good with those, I remember.” 

Dean level his gun at Burnett’s head for that. “Burnett at least had the sense to use the hostage as the shield. Not,” he cocks his gun, “that I’m suggesting you move.”

“Go ahead,” Burnett spreads his arms wide, “shoot me.” He advances a little towards Dean, and that’s all the reason Dean needs to take very careful aim.

“Come on, Dean, shoot me.”

In the corner Cas makes increasingly frantic, if muffled noises, but Dean figures that has a much to do with the fact that he’s bound and gagged as it does with anything else.

Burnett’s getting a little too close for comfort.

Dean shoots him, square in the chest, a perfect shot through the heart.

In the brief silence following the crack of the gun, Cas manages to shout, “You idiot!” and Burnett pins Dean against the wall, which is rather an impressive move for a man who should be dead twice-over.

“My turn,” Burnett whispers, and then he slams Dean back into the wall again. Dean’s pretty sure he’s going to lose consciousness if Burnett so much as looks at him cross-eyed at this point, but he just breathes deeply through his nose and asks, “What do you want?”

“Well, Burnett in here would like to kill you himself,” the thing tells Dean, and he can see it there, the evil in it that Loretta had mentioned, a thick darkness that consumes it eyes, “but we can’t do that yet.”

Dean hears, over the pounding of blood in his ears, oh, Burnett must have decided to start choking him a bit, too, Cas chanting. It sounds like nothing Dean recognizes, Latin, probably. The thing holding him screams and wheels around, but out of its mouth a black, thick smoke is pouring.

While Dean struggles on the floor, the thing advances towards Cas and for a hew horrible seconds Dean believes it’s going to get to him, but then he hears Cas say “Amen” and Burnett’s body falls to the floor. It takes a few more breaths for him to be able to haul himself up and go untie Cas’s legs.

They don’t talk about it until after Dean has called the rest of the team down and they’ve moved Burnett’s body, and Dean and Cas are driving back to the Bureau in the aftermath. Dean, at the wheel, asks without turning, “What the hell was that back there, Cas?”

“I told you,” Cas says, but he sounds tired, not smug. There’s a bruise purpling along the side of his face. “Burnett was possessed. I performed an exorcism. That black smoke you saw? That was the demon leaving his body.”

“Demons, huh,” Dean murmurs to himself. “So did the Catholics have it right, then? God and the Devil and mess of fallen angels just waiting to snap up our souls?”

“I don’t know, Dean,” Cas says, “I don’t know.”

 

A few days later the official FBI statement is given on the matter. Burnett isn’t Burnett anymore, he’s a copycat who happened to bear an extraordinary resemblance to Burnett himself. Dean shot him in self-defense, and the strange, sulfurous powder found in the storage room the day after Dean shot Burnett is never mentioned.

Dean’s eating his lunch down in the basement when, for a change, Cas barges into the room.

“Have you seen it, then?” He asks, out of breath.

“Seen what?” Dean hopes it doesn’t have to do with vampires or mutants or anything that’s going to get between him and his sandwich.

“The statement about Burnett?”

“That? Yeah,” Dean says around a mouthful.

“How can you just take it like that? You saw, you know the truth. It was Burnett in there.”

“Sometimes you don’t need to tell people the truth, Cas. What good would it do?”

Cas gives him something like a sneer, and Dean puts his food down. “Look, Cas, if the government just went out and told people demons were real and roaming the earth looking to possess them, it’d be total chaos. Religion would be blown to pieces. And the possessed, what would happen to them? You think society would look kindly on someone who got ridden by a demon?”

Cas opens his mouth like he’s going to argue, but then apparently thinks better of it, and sinks down into his chair. 

“The truth,” he says, after a long pause. “No matter how unpleasant, people have a right to the truth.”


	3. Phantom Traveller

It must be opposite day, because Dean is sitting in the basement office, eating a sandwich and surfing for porn on Castiel’s computer since he still hasn’t gotten his desk and he figures no one actually looks at Castiel’s history anyway, when Cas comes through the door with a smug look and a thick file that doesn’t bode well for Dean’s extended lunch hour.

“I have a case for us,” Cas proclaims and Dean lets out a silent breath and heads on over to BustyAsianBeauties.com. 

Cas places the folder next to Dean and Dean gets the feeling that, if Cas were anyone else, he would clear his throat or hit Dean with the folder. Cas is Cas, though, so Dean doesn’t look up until Cas finally says, “It’s legitimate. I had to pull several strings to get it.”

Dean perks up at that; he’d been pretty sure Cas didn’t have strings. He says as much, and Cas shrugs.

“I knew some powerful people before I was sent down here. Not all of them are displeased with me.”

Dean clicks out of his previous afternoon plans and flips the folder open. The idea of people being displeased with Cas is sort of ridiculous; Dean understands being annoyed with Cas, or frustrated, or just completely baffled, because he routinely cycles through those three reactions during the week, but he hasn’t ever been displeased.

When he sees the first page, he whistles, “Damn, Cas, you weren’t lying. Who’d you have to blow to get this?”

Cas looks entirely unimpressed with Dean’s suggestion but, answers with, “I told you I knew some powerful people. They are not entirely through with me, it would seem.”

“Yeah, you told me,” Dean agrees, “but I thought you meant you knew another AD or something. Not, you know, anyone this important.”

“You should learn to trust me more,” Cas says, off the cuff and in rhythm, but they both stop and stare at each other. 

Dean does trust Castiel, obviously, since he goes on cases with only Cas for back up, and Cas has saved his ass more times than Dean really wants to admit. He just has a lot of things that he doesn’t share with anyone, ever, and Cas not being an exception doesn’t mean Dean doesn’t trust him. If anyone should be complaining, Dean should; he still doesn’t know if Castiel is even his real name.

Not, of course, that he shares that little opinion with the class. He does mutter something like, “Yeah, of course, and I do trust you,” while rubbing his neck and breaking away from Castiel’s stare—still freaky even after months of working together—but it may come out more like, “Yeah, mmhmm” and then low humming.

“Get your things, I already have plane tickets” Cas tells him, after a few awkward beats. “We need to get to the crash site as soon as possible.”

“Afraid someone’s going to steal all the evidence?”

“Yes, actually,” Cas says and Dean rolls his eyes but grabs his coat. 

 

He figures Cas will explain everything once they’re in the car, and he doesn’t disappoint. Dean’s just pulling out of the Bureau parking garage when Cas flips the folder open and clears his throat.

“I’m assuming you’ve already heard about the crash,” he starts, and doesn’t wait for Dean’s affirmation. “Plane goes down in upstate New York, no details released, no one found alive. At least, not yet,” Cas amends. 

“Collision, do you think?” Dean asks. “That’s what upstairs is saying, anyway.”

“Who’d you hear that from?” Cas asks, sharp, turning to look at Dean.

“I ran into Anna before lunch. She mentioned it.”

Cas narrows his eyes but drops the subject in favor of actually answering Dean’s question. “No, I don’t think it was a collision. There’s no evidence of one, not from commercial or military control towers.”

“Hijacker?”

“Doubtful. They’d let the media all over that one.”

“Hah, probably,” Dean agrees. “So, what? No collisions, no terrorists, it was either the weather or the machinery, and if I remember, there weren’t any storms or anything in upstate New York when this plane went down.”

“Correct,” Cas says, like Dean’s a particularly bright kindergartener. 

“So?” Dean prompts, cutting a dangerous swathe across three lanes of traffic.

“Do you need me to connect all the dots for you?”

“Humor me, Cas,” Dean mutters, as he squeaks through a yellow light. 

Cas makes a noise that would normally make Dean feel completely stupid, but he’s too busy breaking traffic laws to get them to the airport to really pay much attention. 

When he still doesn’t defend himself, Cas breaks and starts to talk. “It has to be mechanical failure, but none of the press releases have even hinted at that sort of thing. Something more is going on; that’s why we have to be there first.”

“Are we gonna beat the clean-up crew?”

“Probably not,” Cas admits, and Dean almost stops the car, but Cas goes on, “but I have talked to the man in charge. He’s been very helpful.”

“Really,” Dean mutters. They’re almost there.

“He promised to tell me what he found before filing his official reports.”

“Well, that’s good news. Anyone else from the Bureau proper involved in this?”

“Not that I’ve heard of,” Cas says, but he goes quiet and Dean, without looking, knows his eyebrows are drawn down and his mouth has gotten thin and tight. “We will be the first people there. I’ve made sure of that.”

He doesn’t sound quite sure enough for Dean’s taste, but Dean lets it go.

 

He falls asleep on the plane while Cas reads off statistics and passenger manifestos, and by the time Dean hears a note of excitement in Cas’s low tones, he’s practically drooling on the window.

 

They land in New York City and Dean bitches at Cas for the entire ride to the New York branch to get their car—and why someone couldn’t have brought it to the airport he doesn’t know—but Cas ignores him in favor of flipping through the passenger manifestos and talking very, very quietly into his cellphone. 

He still isn’t paying attention to Dean while Dean gets a car and wavers between flirting with and snapping at the pretty young thing behind the desk, who manages to make eyes at him while making it perfectly clear that he isn’t worth her time. Dean settles on being an asshole, and sneers at her when she finally turns the keys over. He ushers Cas into the garage and then the passenger seat, starts the engine and doesn’t move.

Cas looks up after a minute; he got off the phone once they entered the New York bureau, but remained engrossed in some sort of paperwork.

“Aren’t we going somewhere?” He demands, one eyebrow arched.

“Yeah,” Dean agrees, and does nothing, “after you tell me what’s going on.”

“I already have,” Cas tells him, but Dean learned to read people up in Violent Crimes, and he’s spent the past several months watching Castiel, so he can tell by the ounce of tension in his jaw that Cas is lying.

“Not everything. You’ve obviously figured something out,” Dean insists, “you’ve had your nose buried in that shit since we were on the plane.”

“It’s nothing,” Cas says, and Dean just scoffs and throws the car into reverse.

They don’t talk the entire way out to the crash site, so Dean fiddles with the radio until he finds a station he likes. Cas looks like he’s torn between throwing himself out the window, breaking the radio, or punching Dean, but Dean very carefully doesn’t care.

 

Dean’s seen a lot of things over the years, things that wouldn’t let him sleep, things that made horror movies look even more ridiculous than they already were. But all Dean’s horrors have been personal: single bodies, single families. The biggest murder scene he’d dealt with that really got him good, left him up at night rereading his dad’s Vonnegut, had been a bedroom. He’s never seen anything like this in person, nothing of this scale. There are twisted pieces of metal everywhere, buried in the scorched ground or hidden in singed trees.

Cas, of course, doesn’t bat an eye at the wreckage. He swans right through it, and Dean has no choice but to man up and pretend like he’s as unaffected as Castiel. Cas heads for a huge tent-like structure on the outer edge of the crash site. Dean knows what it’s for before they get inside, but he still stops and breaths in through his nose before catching back up to Castiel.

The bodies are meticulously lined up and stuffed in black bags, and the anonymity of it makes Dean’s flesh crawl. Cas, still, doesn’t seem to care, since he’s talking to a balding, paunchy middle-aged man who’s probably in charge of the reclamation. Dean sidles up to Cas, just as he’s saying, “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” the other guy tells him, “no one’s had access to the site except for me and my crew.”

“Who has access is irrelevant,” Cas all but snaps, and Dean raises his eyebrows, “I want to know if anyone has actually been to this site.”

“Not that I know of,” the guy says, but he sounds torn between being pissed and terrified, which Dean can understand, since Cas has this glare that even unsettles Dean.

Cas nods, and then asks, “How many bodies have been identified?”

“Just a few,” and then the guy rushes to add, “so far, we’re working on contacting next of kin for all passengers on board.”

“No survivors, then,” Cas says, soft.

“Not that we’ve found, no. Like I told you, we just got here, so there may be someone out father than we’ve swept, but,” here Dean hears for the first time a hint that this guy is actually qualified to be in charge of anything more than dressing himself, “you can go have a look around for yourself. I need to get back to my job.”

Cas nods once, raising his eyebrows. As he turns, he adds, “By the way, this is Agent Winchester. He has the same clearance I do.”

The bald man nods and walks away, leaving Dean to catch up to Castiel and give him this gaping fish stare in lieu of actually asking what the fuck is going.

Cas just tells him, “This is significantly more sensitive than anything else we have ever worked on, Dean.”

“Oh, right. I’d believe that,” he snips, and Cas readies his ‘you’re being completely unreasonable about this’ glare, “except that you haven’t told me what’s going on here, exactly.”

“I know,” Cas exhales, “but, Dean, I’m going to have to ask you to trust me on this one.”

“Fine,” Dean mutters, “but you’ve got to give me something to work with, here. “Cause, honestly, right now? If someone asks me what I’m doing here I’m not going to have much of an answer for them.”

“We’re investigating the circumstances of the plane crash.”

“Obviously, Cas, thanks for that, but that sort of answer’s not going to get me very far with anyone who knows what’s going on.”

“You know as much about this incident as anyone else on the site,” Cas tells him. It’s very obviously the end of the conversation and Dean feels like his head is going to explode if he doesn’t deck Cas, propriety and probation be damned.

Cas, on the other hand, clearly doesn’t care about the fit Dean is slowly working himself up into, because he powerwalks off and kneels beside the first body he encounters. Dean watches as Cas peels the covering off of the corpse and scribbles down some notes before standing up and moving to the next body. Okay, that’s something Dean can handle; he has a pen, and there’s a few balled up pieces of paper in his pocket that he can write on. He purposefully chooses a body at the other end of the tent from Cas. He doesn’t get any reaction. Not, of course, that he was expecting one.

It’s a woman’s body, her face too pale against her thick brown hair, which is tangled and mussed over her face. Dean reaches to brush it away, but stops. You don’t disturb bodies, not like this, so he draws in a hissing breath and jots down: Caucasian female, middle-aged, brunette, and moves on to the next corpse.

It gets easier after the first few. Dean settles back into his Violent Crimes persona, loud and angry but unfazed by everything that comes his way, and he moves through the victims quickly. There isn’t much for him to note except gender, race, and approximate age, but he assumes Cas has a plan for all of this. He’d better, Dean thinks to himself, or there are going to be Words.

Thoughts of having Words with Castiel keep him occupied until he finally, inevitably, hits one of the small bags, just four and a half feet full. He can handle this, does, even, slides black plastic off of a little girl’s face without his hands shaking, notes her race and blonde hair and covers her up faster than he has anyone else.

Kids. It always has to be kids at this sort of thing, like the wreckage and senseless loss of life don’t do enough damage to your mental state, so the world adds a couple of dead children to the mix. Dean knows that he’s especially weak for kids, like, to the extent that people upstairs used to make fun of him for it, so he does his best to look as collected as Castiel does, bending over the crown of a woman’s head.

He checks to make sure no one else is around to have witnessed his freak out and, okay, he’s clear, there’s only Cas, who is pretty aggressively not having anything to do with Dean. Dean tells himself he doesn’t care, and, really, he doesn’t care what Castiel tells him or doesn’t tell him. He’s never been a guy who works closely with his partners, even with Anna there had been a weird distance which had been great when she decided to ditch Dean and head down to the basement. This weird, snarky, buddy-cop TV show thing he has with Cas is just a fluke, and he’s fine with that.

Unfortunately, Dean is in a professional environment so he can’t just sit on his couch and stew while Dr. Sexy plays in the background and he paints his nails or something else ridiculously girly, since, apparently, not being told everything makes him sprout a vagina. He’s still wondering if it’s going too far to look for a bathroom and manually make sure his balls are attached when he looks up and directly into Castiel’s shins.

They seem to have run out of bodies.

“How many did you check?” Cas asks.

Dean counts through his notes as quickly as he can. “’Bout seventy-five.”

“About?”

“Exactly 75,” Dean snaps.

“I have eighty-eight,” Cas tells him with a frown.

“That a problem for you?”

“Yes, actually,” Cas says, and if he was anyone else Dean would think the little edge on the ly was accidental. “There are only one hundred and sixty-two seats on this plane. We have one hundred and sixty-three bodies.”

“One sixty-four,” Dean gestures absentmindedly to the body being brought in just to their right, and then adds, “Crew, Cas. You’re not counting the stewardesses, or the captain.” He doesn’t even bother to hide the smugness in his voice.

“Right,” Cas mutters. “There’d be five more bodies then?”

“Yeah,” Dean agrees, too shocked by the fact that Cas actually asked him to be obnoxious.

“Then we’re short three. It’s still not good.”

“It’s better than having too many,” Dean argues. “Those missing people might be alive, at least.”

“Unlikely,” Cas says and then looks down. “Do we have any idea who’s missing?”

Dean looks through his notes again. “I’ve got a stewardess in my notes, and I’m pretty sure they just brought another one in.”

“No sign of the captain?”

“Not on my side.”

“Not on mine either,” Cas admits. He frowns and flips through the stack of papers in his arms and Dean actively prevents himself from leaning forward to read them.

“So, the captain and two stewardesses are our only problems?”

“Yes,” Castiel says. “We’re going to need to get these two IDed immediately. Get someone to do that,” he orders. Dean bristles, but the bald guy is approaching them, and Dean know they need to present a unified front, so he nods and Cas goes off to do something else Dean can’t know about.

“So, Mister, uh,” Dean trails off.

“Millar,” bald guy supplies, so Dean tries to replace “bald guy” with his actual name in his head.

“Mr. Millar,” Dean starts again, “have you made any headway contacting next of kins?”

“Some,” Millar says, “but our primary job is reconstructing the plane and uncovering the cause of this crash.”

“Right,” Dean agrees, “but I’m going to need IDs on the two stewardesses out there immediately.”

“The FBI investigation considers IDing stewardesses to be more important than establishing a probable cause?”

“In this case, yes,” Dean tells him, trying not to let doubt creep into his voice. “We’re missing two stewardesses and the captain, Millar, which seems like a pretty big deal from where I’m standing. So do it.”

“You have the names of the crew, right?” Millar asks.

“No,” Dean admits, “my partner seems to have taken them.”

Millar looks torn between laughing at Dean and yelling at him. Dean feels much the same way.

“Fine, follow me. I’m sure I have them somewhere, but you’ll have to call the families yourself.”

Dean considers arguing but given the fact that his day has gone downhill at a speed he didn’t believe was possible, he’d probably end up making a fool of himself, so he just nods instead, and follows Millar outside of the tent—finally, it was starting to give him the creeps, like, as a whole—and towards a makeshift command station, where a handful of papers are thrust in his face and he’s all but told to fuck off.

One of the stewardesses, actually, was a steward, so Dean writes an M next to his name and the captain’s. Sarah LaFollette, Colleen Baker, and Martha Hall all have names and numbers under their own. Dean notices that none of them were married; their contacts are parents or siblings, and he thinks back to the two lying in the tent. They were both young, younger than Dean, certainly, younger than Sam—

that’s never a particularly productive train of thought.

Even if he’s not actively thinking about it, Dean’s put himself in the foulest mood he can remember being in since he got himself sent down to the basement. It doesn’t lend itself to a pleasant “Hello, I’m sorry, but I need you to come to upstate New York to identify your daughter’s body,” telephone call manner, but Dean can’t really waste any more time.

“Mrs. Lafollette?” He asks, after a woman’s voice, cracked with age and warm, answers the phone.

“Yes?”

“This is Agent Dean Winchester with the FBI,” he starts, lowering his head even though he can’t see Mrs. Lafollette.

“I haven’t done anything!” She insists, and her voice gets shakier and Dean feels, if possible, even worse than he already did.

“No, ma’am, I know you haven’t. I’m calling about your daughter, Sarah—no, she’s not, she’s not in any trouble with the law—but, ma’am, have you heard about the plane that went down in New York early this morning?”

“Oh my God,” Mrs. Lafollette breathes down the line, and Dean lets her sob into the receiver until he feels something ball up in his throat, too. He’s never gotten a call like this, can’t really imagine it.

“We, ma’am, I’m so sorry, I really am, but we’re going to need you to come up here and ID a body for us, if it’s not a problem.”

“Do I have to?”

Christ, Dean is never prepared for this shit. “Not strictly, no. We can do DNA testing if we need to but that takes time, which I’m afraid we don’t have much of, Mrs. Lafollette.”

“Naturally,” she murmurs. Her voice is still thick and wet. Dean wants to tell her not to move, to call everyone she’s ever known and loved and have them come and hold her hands, and bake her pound cakes and clean her house for the funeral, which is exactly what Dean needs to tell her not to do, not yet.

“If it’s a question of money, Mrs. Lafollette, the bureau—“

“Oh no, honey, it’s not a money problem, we have more money than we know what to do with. Sarah never needed to become a stewardess, goodness, her father told her she shouldn’t, we’re a good family, she could have gone to college, gotten married, but she was always a free spirit, Sarah,” Mrs. Lafollette doesn’t babble, she just speaks in the way that Southerners do, and Dean hears her accent now, light and yet still full, spilling over with stories and opinions and never doubting that they should be shared. “No,” she finishes, “money is not an issue at all. I’ll be up there as soon as I can.”

Dean rattles off people she should call about cars and clearance and all the red tape he’s never bothered himself with. When he hangs up Dean feels like he’s just run a marathon and then been interrogated, but there are still two more calls to make.

Martha Hall’s brother gets very quiet and then very cold and professional, so Dean packs away his condolences with a silent thank-you and gives him the same contacts he gave Mrs. Lafollette. Isaac Hall hangs up before Dean can even thank him for his help.

Dean tries not to think about what it says about him, as a person, that he was so much more comfortable with Isaac than Mrs. Lafollette.

Not, of course, that he felt comfortable with either of them, but they seem like walks in the park compared to Vanessa Baker.

“Hello, this is Vanessa Baker,” she chimes when Dean calls. Her voice is rich and bubbly, and Dean is a little in love with her right off the bat, so he warms up his alluring phone voice.

“This is Agent Dean Winchester with the FBI,” Dean pauses, because most people have Mrs. Lafollette’s reaction to his job, but Vanessa just hums into the receiver, “and I’m calling about your sister Colleen.”

“She was in that plane, right?” Vanessa asks.

“What?” Dean splutters.

“The plane that went down in New York. Colleen was on it, wasn’t she? I was too afraid to check but I was almost sure. She always told me where and when she was flying.”

“I’m sorry,” Dean says, and It’s not even in his deep, manly, comforting voice. He sounds confused and a little wrecked, instead, but there is literally nothing else in his head for him to say to her.

“It’s okay,” Vanessa tells him, and she sounds perfectly normal, “it isn’t your fault. I told her not to go on that flight. I told her to fake sick, or to ask me to invent an emergency.”

“What?” Dean sounds like a bad record, and he can’t stop it.

“I had a bad feeling about this flight,” she says, “but that’s over and done, I suppose. Do you need me up there to ID her body?”

“Yeah,” Dean scrapes out. “That’s exactly what we need.” And before she can open her mouth again, Dean reads her the laundry list of numbers, thanks her, and hangs up.

This is exactly what he needs: another crazy person hovering around with crazy theories while all Dean wants to do is find out what the fuck happened on this plane. Speaking of crazy people, he can see Cas standing yards away, waving his free hand while using the terse voice he has where other people have yells to make someone on the other end of the conversation feel monumentally stupid.

Dean considers going over to Cas and letting him know what’s going on, or, more probably, acting like he’s turned into a fifteen-year old girl and asking why Cas won’t pay attention to him. It isn’t his best plan, so he just sits down on one of two folding chairs someone had brought and tries to get all his self-pity out before he’s forced to interact with anyone else.

That isn’t the case, because as soon as he hangs up, Castiel storms over and all but collapses into the chair next to Dean.

“I hate bureaucracy,” Cas mumbles into his hands.

Dean has a dozen snippy responses to that, but has apparently become a total pussy because all he says is, “Yeah, tell me about it.” Then, since Cas just looks shifty at the prospect of—god forbid—telling Dean anything, he goes on, “I had to do all the next of kin stuff for the stewardesses, just to be sure, you know.”

Cas makes a soft noise of agreement.

“That’s a fucking trip, man, all the little details and that’s not even getting into the fact that you have to tell these people they’ve lost someone, a daughter, a sister, God.”

“I’m sure it’s difficult,” Castiel murmurs.

“Yeah, thank for that,” Dean says snottily. “One of the people I called, Colleen Baker’s sister, Vanessa, she’s a crazy like you.”

“A ‘crazy like me’.” Cas raises an eyebrow.

Dean nods. “She was telling me all about how she warned Colleen not to get on this flight. Said she had a bad vibe about it or something?”

“Really?”Dean can practically see Cas’s ears perking up at that. “She didn’t give you anything beyond that, though?”

“Nope, but don’t worry. She’ll probably be here in hours, so you guys can swap abduction stories or something then.”

“Dean,” Cas sighs, and Dean knows he’s in for a lecture, because Cas seems to default to lecturing whenever he’s already exhausted and Dean gets on his nerves, “when will you learn to respect nontraditional ways of looking at things? I would think, given your past experiences, that you would at least—”

“You don’t know a fucking thing about my past experiences, Cas,” Dean growls. Cas stops mid-sentences, eyes wide and lips still parted.

“I’m sorry,” he starts, “I didn’t mean to, Dean,” but Cas clearly doesn’t know where he’s going with this. Dean doesn’t know if he’s ever actually heard Cas apologize.

“It’s okay,” Dean takes pity and decides to let Cas off easy, just this once. 

Cas looks like he’s going to respond with something obnoxious but his phone rings, and he answers with an eyeroll.

“Hello? Yes, this is he. Oh, you have? Good. I’ll be there tomorrow,” he says, and covers up the receiver with one hand. “The Baker woman will be here today, right?”

Dean nods, and Cas says, “Tomorrow, then. Early,” and hangs up.

“You want to talk to Vanessa Baker so badly that you’re willing to push back this,” Dean waves his hand to encompass the nebulous Thing that Cas has been bitching about, “to do it?”

“I do. I think her ‘bad feeling’ may confirm my own suspicions about the crash.”

“Cas, dude, she’s some chick who’s into all that new-age bullshit and thinks she’s a little psychic. How the hell is that going to make your suspicions any more valid?”

Cas just makes his mouth into this pissed off little moue and Dean shrugs. “Not my problem. You can do what you want.”

 

After that Dean just sort of wanders around the site like a sad, little tumbleweed until some angel brings pizza, and then he’s a sad, little tumbleweed with pizza, which he’s pretty sure is some sort of upgrade. The pizza somehow reminds him of how tired he is, since it’s like eight or nine at night, and Dean starts scoping out places where he could catch some shuteye without anyone giving him grief for it.

That plan lasts just long enough for Dean to start falling asleep. He’s interrupted by Cas coming up and gripping his shoulder squeezing it a little since he’s clearly not a person and doesn’t know to just shake Dean or throw something at him or yell. But, no, he just sort of squeezes Dean’s shoulder until Dean finally groans and says, “All right, Jesus, Cas, I’m up. What’s going on?”

“The next of kin are here to identify the stewardesses’ bodies.”

“What, all three of them at once?”

“Yes.”

“Just my lucky day, I guess,” Dean mutters as he stands up. “Where are they?”

“Just by the bodies.”

“Already looking at them?”

“No, I told them they couldn’t enter without us.”

“How professional of you.” Cas doesn’t rise to the bait, though, so Dean sighs and follows him towards the huddled group in the distance.

Mrs. Lafollette is wringing a handkerchief nervously as she introduces herself, and Isaac Hall doesn’t even nod in acknowledgment as Dean ushers them towards the bodies. They’ve put the girls off to the side, apart from the passengers, on Cas’s insistence. 

Vanessa smiles at Dean when he comes over, but before Dean can get anything out of his mouth, even his name of “Hello,” Cas is all up in her business and so Dean has to escort Isaac and Mrs. Lafollette by himself.

“Uh, so, here they are, just, I’m going to let you look one at a time, we have names matched to them but we’re still not sure, obviously, or you wouldn’t be here. Right,” Dean says, trying to stop himself from making the whole thing any more uncomfortable. He moves to the first body and sighs. “We believe this is Martha Hall.” Isaac, still without making a sound, is suddenly kneeling next to Dean.

Isaac looks at her face and draws in a shuddering breath and turns away before Dean can even draw the bag back over her face. He scribbles “confirmed” next to Martha Hall’s name and looks at Isaac. “Thank you,” he says, even as he knows it’s inadequate.

Isaac just walks away, so Dean waves Mrs. Lafollette over and she presses a veined hand to her mouth. Her nails are painted black. Christ, Dean is not prepared for this; he never is. Still, he uncovers Sarah Lafollette’s face and watches her mother burst into tears. Dean marks Sarah as positively identified and places a hand in the middle of Mrs. Lafollette’s back. Even through her thick coat, with its fur collar and air of old money, Dean can feel her back heave with tiny sobs, and how cold she is.

He sits her down next to Isaac, outside of the tent, and approaches Cas and Vanessa, who are huddled close, leaning towards each other. Dean doesn’t feel bad at all sauntering up and placing a hand on each of their shoulders.

“Well, Vanessa, I’m sorry, but,” Dean tries to school his voice into something more appropriate, and does an abysmal job, “both of the bodies have been confirmed as Sarah Lafollette and Martha Hall. Your sister, she must be the missing one.”

Cas gives him the stink eye, and crowds Vanessa a bit, but she nods and looks Dean in the eyes. “Has the captain’s body been found?”

“I can’t tell you that, I’m sorry.” He isn’t. Vanessa is sort of gorgeous; her hair is thick and brown and her eyes gleam in the poor light around them, but she sets him on edge the way Castiel did when Dean first met him, except that she’s also acting a little bit like a sociopath or something, with how unconcerned she is about her missing sister. Dean won’t hit a girl, but he considers making an exception just for Vanessa and her devil-may-care attitude.

“He is,” Cas supplies and Dean looks at him with wide, angry eyes. Vanessa smiles at Cas and Dean bites his tongue.

“Thank you,” she says to Cas, pointedly, turning away from Dean.

“Do you think?” Cas asks, and Vanessa places one hand on his shoulder.

“It’s what I believe. You need to find him, and my sister, please.”

Cas just nods and Vanessa slips away, tells them she’s going to wait with the others to be taken away from the site. Dean doesn’t really want to punch her anymore. He thinks it was that final “please,” the fact that her voice finally caught in the same way Mrs. Lafollette’s had or Isaac’s would have had he dared to speak. 

“What the fuck?” Dean growls at Cas once she’s out of earshot.

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t give me that. You know what I’m asking about.”

“Indulge me,” Cas snarks. 

“Why did you tell her we hadn’t found the pilot’s body?”

“She asked,” Cas tells him with a shrug.

“So?” Dean demands. “That’s classified information. We can’t leak that sort of stuff, or the press is going to be all over us.”

“She isn’t going to tell anyone, Dean,” Cas reassures him.

“You trust her that much,” Dean sneers. Cas looks genuinely taken aback, and normally Dean, who isn’t a total dick, would feel pretty bad about that. Right now, he figures it’s fair play.

“I do. I think she understands what’s going on here, Dean.”

“Well, that makes two of you.” Dean turns and starts walking—he’s tired and still hungry and sort of furious with the world—but then stops and looks back at Cas. “I’m assuming there isn’t anything else you need me to do tonight.”

“There is something,” Cas admits, and he nearly sounds sheepish.

“It can’t wait until the morning?”

“It would be best done soon, and quickly.”

“You can’t do it yourself?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I have a flight to catch in about four hours.”

“Oh,” Dean says, because that’s about all he can say to that. “What do you need me to do?” He knows he sounds defeated, but he is, a little bit. Not, of course, that he’d ever admit to it.

To his credit, Cas looks almost crestfallen at Dean’s tone. His mouth droops a bit and his eyes get sad around the edges. “You have to find those two missing bodies, Dean.”

“That’s not really my job, Cas. In fact, there are people here expressly to do that sort of thing.”

“They can’t be trusted,” Cas says in the same tone he had used to try and sell Dean not only the “Burnett is a demon” idea, but the “let’s go to New Mexico, coincidentally, the Roswell area,” trip, as well. So Cas actually has a pretty decent track record with that sort of shit. Not today, though, today it would take nothing short of divine intervention to get Dean to go along with Cas, about anything.

“I thought you had Millar’s assurance that we’d be the only FBI people here. He sounded pretty trustworthy.”

“Not this trustworthy.”

“Really, Cas? You’re going to be paranoid about two missing bodies?”

“And you aren’t?” Cas raises an eyebrow and Dean almost loses it.

“Fine,” Dean snaps, “but that’s it. I find these bodies for you and I’m done. Work the case on your own. I’m sure you can handle it.” He stalks out of the tent before Cas can get a chance to respond.

 

The next two and a half hours Dean spends mucking around the site, in the scorched earth and the debris and farther up, where there’s a lake, and therefore mud, do wonders for his mood. By the end of it, when he’s dirty and cold and damp and exhausted, Dean thinks he would probably punch a baby if the baby was between him and a warm bed. He hasn’t even found anything, which should make him nervous, but mostly just makes him even more irritated.

His hotel room is too cold and empty and ugly, but Dean is also too tired to care. He barely gets his clothes off before he’s asleep.

 

In his dream Dean is twelve again. He’s outside in the oppressive heat of Kansas in the summer. Sam is digging a hole in the back corner of their yard. His eighth birthday is coming up, and Dean’s going to buy him a toy truck, because Sam never grew out of that phase. It’s still adorable. Sam looks up with wide, pleading eyes, and his lower lips sticks out. Dean rolls his eyes and heads inside, where their mother has lemonade sitting on the counter.

Dean wakes with a strangled noise in the back of his throat. According to the hotel clock it’s 6:33, so he figures the continental breakfast will be out and drags himself up and out of bed. Dean would prefer to sleep until someone makes him get up, but he knows that’s not going to happen today. 

Over coffee and pancakes and a mediocre chocolate muffin Dean tries to figure out exactly why he had to have the dream last night, of all nights. He hasn’t had it in months, so his guilt may have just spun a wheel and decided that it was as good a time as any, but Dean decides to blame it on Vanessa Baker and her wild eyes, and how little she seemed to care about Colleen, lost out there somewhere in that mess.

He lets the righteous fury simmer as he drives back out to the crash site, where Millar is waiting for him.

“Your partner not here?” Is all Dean receives by way of greeting.

“Nope. Said he had something important to do,” Dean says with a shrug.

“He didn’t say when he’d be back?” Millar asks with the answer already on his tongue.

“Of course not. He’ll be back when he’s found whatever he’s looking for.”

Millar bites his lower lip and Dean considers leaving, when the other man says, “All right, I guess I can tell you about it. He didn’t say anything about that?”

Dean quirks an eyebrow but doesn’t raise any of the million objections to that last sentence that he could. Millar gestures over his shoulder for Dean to follow him towards where he and his team have been reassembling the plane. Dean’s area of expertise is so far from rebuilding planes that he knows his opinion doesn’t have much weight, but he can’t see anything obviously wrong. 

Millar walks him up and down the length of the plane, pointing out the doors and the wings and the engines, and each time he says nothing had gone wrong with any of those parts. By the cockpit, Millar stops and shrugs. “Nothing is wrong, as far as we can tell out here in the field, with anything here. None of the machinery.”

“Then what happened?” Dean asks.

“One of two things,” Millar sighs, and Dean readies himself for a Castiel level revelation of conspiracy, “either the captain somehow flew the plane into the ground, or a spontaneous mechanical failure occurred and left no signs behind.”

“And the captain’s body is still missing?”

Millar nods and Dean feels a smile start on his face. “I think, then, that one of those is more likely than the other, considering the evidence.”

“I know,” Millar agrees, “but it’s a difficult claim to make. It’s not one people want to hear, because it’s not really anything we could have really prevented.”

Dean nods and pulls out his phone. Cas doesn’t pick up the first time, so Dean texts him “answer ur phone its important.” 

“He just ran off, then?” Millar asks and Dean sighs.

“Yup. Like I said, told me it was important and that’s it.”

“Well, so is this,” Millar mutters.

“Yeah, tell me about it. I don’t act on this, it’s going to be my ass on the line, not his.”

“Sucks,” Millar offers.

“Story of my life,” Dean snarks. He dials Cas’s number again. It goes to voicemail again, and normally Dean would be laughing at Castiel’s confused “Why do you want me to say my name,” but all he does is furrow his brow and wait for the beep.

“Hey, Cas, call me back. I’ve got something pretty important up here. Seriously.” Dean debates calling Cas an asshole, too, but hangs up before he can actually do it.

“So,” he says, turning back to Millar, “you got anything else I can do up here?”

 

Cas finally calls Dean back two hours later, while Dean is arguing with one of Millar’s lackeys about a yellow residue found in the cockpit. It’s a welcome distraction.

“Winchester,” he snaps without looking at the incoming number.

“Dean, it’s me,” Cas says, and Dean manages to scale back his thirty- minute long tirade about Cas and the way he’s been running this case into one short, violent, and very sincere

“Fuck you.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t respond to your calls immediately. I have been busy.”

“I’m sure you have,” Dean mutters, “but you could have at least told me what you were doing. Millar asked and I looked like a complete idiot because I didn’t know.”

Cas doesn’t respond to that and, frankly, Dean wasn’t expecting him to. Instead, he asks, “What was so important?”

“We think we know what brought the plane down.”

“Oh.” Cas sounds less impressed than Dean hoped he would be. “And?”

“Ruling out some sort of spontaneous mechanical failure that left no trace, which I think we can, it has to have been the pilot.”

“What?” Now Cas sounds concerned, and alert. Dean is disgustingly proud of himself.

“The only other option, as far as Millar and I can figure, is that the captain flew the plane into the ground. Thing is, we’re not sure why. I was sort of hoping you could use your sketchy connections to get his records for us.”

“I already have them,” Cas tells him, voice stiff. “Is there anything else? My flight is about to leave.”

“Just that they found a yellow powder in the cockpit. I’m having some of it sent to the lab.”

“Good,” Cas says, and Dean doesn’t even get the honor of ending the call.

 

He tools around the site waiting for Cas to get back, breaking to snipe with Pendrell about the weird powder or to convince Millar that he and Cas know what they’re doing. Dean has spent most of his life pretending he has things together in a way that he never actually has, so it’s easy. He smiles at Millar’s crew and gives Millar his steely-eyed cop glare that he used to practice in the mirror when he was in high school.

After lunch—Subway, which Dean doesn’t mind but everyone else on site apparently does—Vanessa Baker approaches him. He didn’t know she was still in town, so Dean uses that as an excuse for the brief facial contortion he makes when he sees her.

“I figured I’d stick around until Colleen is found,” Vanessa tells him with a shrug.

“It could be a while,” Dean says.

“I can wait. I don’t exactly have much going on at home.”

“Can’t imagine why.” Dean isn’t acting at all like he should be, both because she’s a victim’s sister and a beautiful woman. He can’t quite bring himself to care, though.

“What the hell is your problem?”

“You may not have noticed, but a plane crashed here and killed more than a hundred and fifty people, and we haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer as to why.”

“Yeah,” Vanessa shrugs, “but isn’t that your job?”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“No offence, but no one else around here seems to enjoy this, and, yet, they aren’t being total assholes to me.”

“I’ve always been precocious,” Dean snaps. He stares her down until she leaves. At least he had learned that well, this ability to stonewall people out of conversations, out of his whole fucking life. He feels raw around the edges today, like he did when he ended up getting himself sent to the basement, like he felt at twelve and twenty, at eighteen and on his first day at the Bureau.

So it’s a relief when Cas finally shows up, his coat a little rumpled and his hair sticking up but his tone all business. He heads for Dean first, and Dean gets to his feet with a groan.

“Have they found the captain’s body yet?”

“No,” Dean tells him, and Cas’s face falls a little. Dean feels like he’s personally disappointed Cas, but shoves that down.

“Right. And the powder?”

“Pendrell says that it’s sulfur, but he doesn’t have a good explanation for what the hell it was doing in the cockpit.”

“Sulfur? You’re sure?”

“Pendrell hasn’t been wrong in all the years I’ve known him.”

“Where’s Millar?”

“Over there somewhere.” Dean flaps his hands towards the cockpit.

“And Vanessa?”

“What do you need with her?” When Cas only stares, Dean sighs. “I don’t know. She was around earlier, just ask Millar or something. Do you need me for anything else?”

“No.”

“I’m going back to the hotel, I’ve been here for fucking ages. You have your own car, right?”

“Yes,” Cas says, already heading away.

 

Dean jerks awake from a dreamless sleep hours later, feeling uneasy. He’s uneasy, apparently, because Cas is standing there, watching him, and his eyes glint in the faint light from the parking lot. In short, it’s the most terrifying thing Dean has seen in years.

“We found the captain.”

 

The captain’s body is practically unrecognizable. His arms and legs are broken and bent at unnatural angles, and his face has, for all intents and purposes, been ripped off. The whole tableau is so unreal that Dean feels nothing more than confusion. 

“His heart has also been ripped out,” Cas offers from Dean’s side.

“What? That doesn’t make any sense,” Dean blurts.

“He could,” Millar starts, already sounding unsure, “have somehow impaled himself on a tree or some part of the plan during impact.”

Dean kneels beside the late captain, getting as close to his chest as he can without actually touching the body. Cas passes him a pair of latex gloves over Dean’s shoulder, and Dean lips them on, so he can prod at the wound. 

“No,” he tells Millar after a moment, “that’s almost impossible. This is a clean incision. Someone must have actually cut his heart out. That’s all I can think of.” Dean straightens and shrugs at Millar. “We’re still missing Colleen Baker and the other steward, right?”

“Actually, Dean,” Cas breaks in, “we found what was left of the missing steward.”

“Lovely.”

“We think he was in a standing position in one of the cabins, assisting someone, which explains why he was in pieces.”

“So, no sign of Colleen, still?”

“No,” Cas sighs.

“Do you think?” Dean starts to ask, but it’s the kind of thing he would expect Castiel to say, so he keeps his mouth shut.

“Do I think what?” Cas probes. The left corner of his mouth twitches up and Dean’s heart sinks. He knows, Dean thinks to himself, he knows exactly what bullshit I’m thinking, and he wants me to say it out loud.

“That Colleen could have survived?”

“Unlikely,” Millar offers, “considering the speed of the plane upon impact and the fact that no one else made it out alive, either.”

Dean swallows. Cas catches his eyes and his mouth makes a resigned little line. 

“But the fact that she hasn’t been found yet, Mr. Millar,” Cas explains, “is very suspicious, especially considering the thoroughness of our search. Either she’s alive, or someone found her before we could.”

“But who?” Millar asks, looking increasingly worried.

“Exactly. Unless someone made it onto the site and removed her body without your knowing it, our best bet is that she somehow left here on her own, before anyone had time to respond to the crash.”

Millar just gives them fish eyes and a gaping mouth, so Dean pulls off the gloves and looks up at Cas. “See if there’s anything in the captain’s records that we could use to explain this,” he waves his hand around the crash site, “and I’ll call local hospitals to see if they admitted anyone fitting Colleen’s description recently.”

Cas actually smiles at that, and offers a hand as Deans pulls himself up from the ground.

 

Twenty minutes later Dean has nothing, and he tells Cas as much. Cas does this thing with his face that makes Dean’s stomach sink and hands him some papers. Dean just stares at Cas until the other man sighs and snatches the files back. “The captain recently survived a plane crash.”

“So we think this is some sort of PTSD thing?”

“That’s what we’ll tell the press. Upstairs has been riding me for some sort of explanation for hours.”

“But what really happened?”

“Well,” Cas gets a gleam in his eye and the right corner of his mouth curls up, “this crash involved only one other person: a captain Jacobs, who himself had survived the crash of a plane he was acting as co-pilot for.”

“Wait, what?” 

“Jacobs was in a plane that crashed in Spain, and then the two-person plane he was flying with our Captain Burke. Burke survived that crash, but Jacobs didn’t. And now…”

“Burke is dead and Colleen Baker is still walking around.”

“Exactly.”

“Which still doesn’t explain anything to me, Cas.”

“I’ll tell you everything after the press conference. You have twenty minutes before the reporters get here, so you might want to freshen up.”

“Me?”

“Obviously. I don’t have the people skills for it.”

Dean can’t think of an argument for that, since Cas’s smirk as he heads off to do something else secretive and important is pretty much case and point. Instead, he finds his car and spends the next twenty minutes fixing his hair and trying to think of something convincing to say to the crowd of reporters gathering on the edges of the site.

“Your partner could have warned me about this,” Millar mutters as Dean runs his hand through his hair one more time.

“That makes two of us,” he whispers back as he heads out to where the mics have been set up.

There are about a dozen reporters gathered, all dressed in sensible black suits. Someone takes a photograph as Dean heads towards the mic. He knows how to do this, Dean reminds himself, has given several statements of Bureau opinion on things like serial killers or child predators. He’s just never consciously lied to the public.

As he leans forward and tells them, hunched forward like vultures, “I’m Agent Dean Winchester, assigned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to work with Mr. Millar and his team in order to find the cause of this horrific crash,” he wonders if Cas knows exactly how much of a hypocrite he’s being.

“I’m sorry to reveal to you that the crash was due to human error.” Dean pauses and waits for the buzz to die down, and aggressively ignores the woman from the New York Times, who looks like she’ll have a fit if he doesn’t take her question. “Captain Burke had been involved in a minor plane crash—a two-man short flight, it which the other man was killed—and we believe that the captain experienced post-traumatic stress disorder type flashbacks, which caused him to fly in such a way as to crash the plane.”

Even as he speaks the whole thing sounds like complete bullshit, but Dean pulls up his inscrutable government agent face and refuses to answer questions. He doesn’t care if they all go off and write articles speculating about what actually happened out here. He’d prefer it that way, honestly.

Cas is waiting for him out of the reporters’ sight, and Dean just shakes his head. “I looked like a total asshole out there, Cas. Don’t make me do shit like that again.”

“It couldn’t be helped. If we didn’t have some sort of statement ready they were going to send another team up here.”

“That really so bad?”

“Yes,” Cas hisses, “now, hurry up. We need to get down to New York City.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain on the way.”

“Yeah, you always do.”

 

Dean drives and Cas stares out the window for what feels like half the trip, until Dean turns the radio off with a sharp click and turns to Cas. “Spill, now. I’m not going anywhere else until I know what’s going on.”

“Fine,” Cas sighs. “Colleen Baker is on her way to LaGuardia airport, where she will be acting as a stewardess on a flight to Los Angeles.”

“She’s not, you know, harmed from the plane crash she just survived?”

“For all I know, she might already be dead.”

Dean looks back at the road while he thinks about that. With Cas, though, if he’s getting closemouthed and shady about things there’s really only one answer. “Demons, then?” Dean asks.

“A special sort. It doesn’t override rational brain function the way normal demons do.”

“Like with Burnett,” Dean offers.

“Yes. As far as I can tell, this demon specializes in causing disasters.”

“So it’s been hopping from victim to victim.”

“It’s the only way to explain the coincidences.”

“What do we need to do?”

“Exorcise Colleen Baker, of course, hopefully before she manages to get on the plane.”

“Get on that then,” Dean snaps. “Call every goddamn security agent in LaGuardia and have them stop her from getting on that plane. Tell them it’s some sort of breach of quarantine if you have to.”

“Nervous?” Cas jokes, and Dean tightens his hands around the steering wheel until his knuckles go white.

“I’m not a great fan of flying,” he mutters. Cas makes a noise but mercifully drops the subject. “Call, Cas!”

“Right.” 

Dean tries not to listen as Cas gets increasingly agitated to his right. It’s not like he’s ever been on a flight that encountered anything more than light turbulence, but whenever he gets on a plane his stomach drops and his knees kind of go stiff.

“She won’t listen,” Cas tells him as they hit city traffic.

“What?”

“I asked for Colleen, but she won’t listen.”

“Well, c’mon, Cas, she’s possessed. What the fuck did you expect?”

“This sort of demon doesn’t override personal judgment.”

“Get her sister to call,” Dean orders. They’re stuck, and by the time they get to the airport the plane will probably be boarding.

“I thought you,” Cas starts, and Dean knows where he’s going with this, but cuts him off.

“Yeah, I do, but I’d rather ask her for help than have to get on a plane that’s going to crash,” he snaps.

Cas obeys, and Dean can hear ringing on the other end of the line. It goes on, and on, and finally her voicemail answers. Cas hangs up and Dean swears. “Should have known she’d be useless,” he mutters.

“I don’t understand why you dislike her so much.”

“If we get out of this alive, maybe I’ll tell you.”

“We’ll just have to make it out alive, then,” Cas says, his face soft.

 

Dean parks somewhere that’s probably illegal, and they blow past airport security so fast he’s pretty sure they’re going to get arrested, but they find themselves boarding a plane headed to Chicago without anyone giving them more than a second look. 

Colleen must already be on the plane, because Dean doesn’t see her, which makes him nervous.

“It will be fine,” Cas whispers from behind him, “all we have to do is exorcise her.”

“Yeah,” Dean mutters back, “I can’t imagine how that could go wrong on a crowded plane.”

“I’ve got it all figured out.”

“I’m sure you do.” Dean’s overexcited about getting in the last word with Cas, for once, as they finally scan their tickets and head towards their seats, but it’s been a pretty shitty case all around, so he’ll take what he can get.

They’re in 22 D and E, and Dean takes advantage of being first to steal the window seat. Cas just rolls his eyes and tucks himself against the far armrest. Dean wants to yank him away from the aisle, and tell Cas he’s getting in everyone’s way, but to do that he’d be pulling Cas towards him, and that raises a whole host of issues Dean is, hopefully, never going to address.

Once boarding has finished, Cas gestures for a stewardess to come towards him, makes her lean forward and flashes her his badge. Her eyes go wide and she sort of starts, but Cas holds her in place. Dean can’t hear what he says, but the woman looks shaken as she nods and Dean figures that’s what Cas meant by “I’ve got it all figured out.”

They still take off, though, which Dean had fervently hoped would be avoided. He concentrates on not having a panic attack when, as they hit 10,000 feet, he sees Colleen Baker. Cas doesn’t even bat a lash, just keeps on reading the fucking SkyMall catalogue.

“Gonna get my birthday present from that?” Dean teases.

“Do you want one of these giant crossword puzzles? I think they look quite interesting.” Cas fixes him with such a genuine look that Dean can’t help laughing.

“Sure.”

They fall quiet until the plane reaches cruising altitude, and Cas undoes his seatbelt. Dean follows suit and they wait, probably for the stewardess to give them some sort of sign. He sees her appear from the back of the plane, but just then, everything shakes.

While Dean’s still clutching wildly at his armrests and trying to keep his breathing under control while also still looking sort of like a badass, Cas is on his feet. “Come on,” he snaps.

“Fine,” Dean manages, and drags himself after Cas, towards the back of the plane.

Colleen’s still there, with her hair fanned out loose over her shoulders. She looks like Vanessa, a little, and Dean grimaces. Then the plane pitches forwards and Dean barely manages to keep himself from wiping out.

“Christo,” he hears Cas says, and Colleen makes a weird hissing noise in the back of her throat and tries to run past Dean.

He doesn’t need Cas yelling “Stop her!” to know to grab Colleen’s arm and wrench her to a halt. She scratches at Dean’s hand, so he pulls her free hand away and drags her back towards Cas. “Hurry it up,” he mutters, and the three are thrown to the ground as the plane rolls in a storm that isn’t there, “before she crashes this thing.”

“Touchy,” Cas replies, but he kneels next to Colleen and the Latin rolls of his tongue so smooth it might be water and a duck’s back, and Colleen pitches and nearly breaks Dean’s hold, so he gets practically on top of her and apologizes to God and his mother before he clamps down on her thighs with his knees.

Outside of this strange little section of the plane, curtained off, Dean can hear the other passengers screaming, and the pilot talking fast over the intercom. Colleen’s nails are drawing blood by the time Cas finally says Amen and her back arches clean off of the ground and the plane gives a final roll.

Everything goes perfectly still and for a moment Dean thinks they’re dead. But then he can hear the sobs from outside and the captain’s voice telling them he’s regained control of the plane and they’ll be able to head on to Chicago with no problem. 

Cas catches his gaze and smiles. “I told you I had everything figured out.”

Dean tries to come up with some sort of biting response but his adrenaline is pumping, and as he lets go of Colleen he realizes she isn’t breathing.

“Shit.”

“She must have died in the first crash,” Cas murmurs.

“How are we going to explain that to the authorities?” Dean hisses. Cas’s face darkens and Dean sees something in there he doesn’t like, but it goes as quickly as it came and Cas looks up at him with a grin.

“In this case, Dean, we are the authorities.”

 

That sort of cocky bullshit apparently works, since someone Dean doesn’t recognize, a huge black man who looks less than thrilled to see Dean, meets them at the plane and takes Colleen’s body without a word while Dean and Cas put as much distance between them and the traumatized passengers as possible.

“Who was that?” Dean asks as they sit at Starbucks, still in O’Hare.

“A connection,” Cas tells him in the voice Dean has come to know pretty well over the case. It’s the one that lets Dean know the conversation is over, whether or not he’d like it to be.

“Fine,” he says. Dean’s tired. He hasn’t slept much during this whole mess, and he doesn’t have the energy left to get angry at Cas. Not for at least another week.

“We’re going to have to call Vanessa, you know.” Cas sounds as enthusiastic as Dean feels.

“Can’t your connection do it?” Dean asks, not even bothering to look up from his coffee.

“Hah. No. That’s our job.”

“Yours, you mean. I’m not calling her,” Dean tells Cas. He tries to sound firm.

“Isn’t that more your area of expertise?”

“Not with her. Cas, just, come on. Do me a favor, just this once. Please?” Dean hates the way his voice hitches on the last word but it forces Cas to make a soft noise and pull out his phone, so Dean’s pride isn’t as wounded as it could be.

“Vanessa?” Cas asks, and Dean lowers his head to the table and actively tries not to listen for the next five or six minutes while Castiel makes more of a shitshow out of the call than Dean would have, no matter how angry and self-righteous he might have gotten.

“Wow,” he says to Cas when it’s finally over, “you really are awful at that kind of stuff. Are you actually a robot?”

“No,” Cas retorts, “I’m just bad over the phone.”

“Cas,” Dean barks out a laugh, “that’s not ‘bad over the phone.’ That’s, like, emotionally stunted or something.”

“I am not emotionally stunted,” Cas growls, “and you’re not a picture of sympathy yourself.”

“Not with her,” Dean admits with a shrug. He feels petty saying it, but it has been one of the most spectacularly awful cases of his career, excepting one or two from before Cas, and Dean rarely allows himself the luxury of being petty. He’s going to work the shit out of this.

“You did promise me you’d tell me what you found so distasteful about Vanessa. She was a very attractive young lady, after all. I would have thought you’d like her.”

“Didn’t you see her, Cas?”

“Obviously.”

“No, jackass, her attitude. She didn’t care at all, you know. Her sister, God,” Dean stops for a second and sips at his coffee, “her sister, Cas, was missing, probably dead, and all she could do was talk about her fucking premonition. Who the hell does that?”

“People deal with grief differently, Dean,” Cas admonishes.

“You don’t think I know that, Cas! I’ve seen a lot of ways of coping, but they usually involved being grieved first. She didn’t give a fuck, as far as I could see.”

“Dean,” Cas starts, but Dean shakes his head.

“Look, I’m sorry. This isn’t your fault, I shouldn’t be blowing up at you.” Cas looks genuinely perplexed at that, and maybe a bit worried.

“You’re going to have to talk about this eventually, you know,” Cas says after an awkward silence.

“Not if I can help it,” Dean says into his cup. He’s almost done, and they should be trying to get a flight back to DC.

“You can trust me,” Cas tells him.

“Yeah, so you’ve told me,” Dean admits, “but you’re gonna have to trust me on this one.”

“Dean…”

“Cas, I told you what you wanted to know. If you’re so damn eager to pry into my personal life, look it up. I’m sure they’ve got files on me upstairs. Use your connections.”

Cas looks crestfallen but follows Dean as he rises. They don’t talk until they’re back in DC, interminable hours later.

 

Cas is in meetings with Skinner and people Dean doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know for what feels like days on end, so he gets in a lot of quality porn time down in the basement. It’s in the middle of some great new BustyAsianBabes.com content that Anna pokes her head through the door.

“Dean?”

“Hey, Anna.” Dean smiles as he tries to covertly hide his crotch and click out of the website. “What’s up?”

“I just thought I’d see what you guys were up to down here.”

“Really,” Dean drawls, “and it has nothing to do with the very juicy and important case we had last week?” Anna blushes and Dean smile. “It’s okay. What did you want to ask?”

“Just what happened. I saw the press release, Dean, and you lie so badly sometimes.”

“Only sometimes, though,” he stresses.

“Yes,” Anna agrees, “and this was one of those times.”

“Everything I said was true, though,” Dean points out. He moves out of his awkward hiding position since this conversation is doing a number on his erection.

“I know that,” Anna tells him. She sounds like she should be flipping her hair. “You put it all together, wrong, though.”

“Well, if you know everything, why are you asking me?”

“I just wanted to know if it was true.”

“If what was true?”

“I’m not going to say it, Dean,” Anna hisses.

“Why not?”

“People could be listening.”

“In here,” Dean says, waving his arms around to cover the whole pathetic space.

“Yes,” Anna sighs, “upstairs did ask you to report on Castiel for a reason.”

“Which I told them I wasn’t going to do.”

“But you have,” Anna reminds him. “Not, of course, that you’re telling them what they want.”

“I’m just telling them the truth,” Dean protests.

“You really think they care about that?” Anna stands and starts pacing around the room. She used to do that when she worked with Dean, and it drove him up the wall then, too.

“Okay, fair, but what the hell am I going to do, Anna? No one told me my reports were such a problem that they had to send you down here to hound me about them.”

“I’m not here to hound you,” Anna all but whines. Dean knows that voice; it’s the one she uses to distract Dean from the fact that he’s found out her plan. 

“What are you doing, Anna?” Dean scrubs a hand over his face. Normally he’d be okay playing this game with her, but he’d rather be watching porn or maybe catching up on his sleep.

“Just, Dean, I know I’ve told you before, but you need to be careful, okay?”

“I am. Still here, aren’t I?”

Anna smiles at that and something warm blooms in Dean’s chest. He doesn’t miss working with Anna, not really; she was less efficient than Cas and hounded Dean about his lifestyle pretty incessantly, but he has missed talking to someone who smiles and laughs and jokes.

“You need to be more careful with that partner of yours,” she warns.

“Cas? They like him even less than they like me, far as I can tell.”

Anna quirks her lips and raises her eyebrows. “You can think whatever you want to think, but remember that I warned you. I’ve got to go.”

“Bye,” Dean calls out as she leaves.

“Look after yourself,” she says, looking over her shoulder.

 

They finish interrogating Cas on a Wednesday. On Thursday, Dean is called to Skinner’s office.

Skinner’s secretary waves him through with the same dedicated lack of interest she always shows, and Dean coughs once, awkwardly, to announce his presence.

“Winchester,” Skinner greets.

“You wanted to talk to me?” Dean hates, hates, hates having to explain himself after a case. As far as he can remember it’s never ended well for him, and if they’ve already raked Cas over the coals he can’t imagine he’s going to get gentler treatment.

Skinner sighs, and gives Dean a look somewhere between pity and anger. “Do you mind explaining exactly what you’re trying to say with this report?” He waves it around, before dropping it back to his desk with a loud slap.

“It says what it says.”

“That Colleen Baker survived one plane crash and went on to attempt a second?”

“I didn’t say it made sense, but it was what I saw.”

“Winchester, don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be.”

“I’m telling you, sir, everything in that report is the truth.”

Skinner sighs again, and Dean feels like he’s missing the point in some huge, cosmic way.

“Dean,” Skinner starts, and Dean briefly considers begging forgiveness already; Skinner has never, not even when Dean was getting sent to the basement in the first place, used his first name, “you know why we sent you down to the basement.”

“You wanted a spy,” Dean says.

“Yes,” Skinner admits, “that was part of it. We needed someone with a level head on their shoulders,” Skinner waits for Dean to finish laughing, “and while I’d never use that phrase to describe you, ever, you are relentlessly down to earth, Winchester.”

“Thank you?”

“We had been hoping,” Skinner punctuates this with a glare, “that you would disprove Castiel’s theories, or at least shed some degree of reasonable doubt on them.”

“I can’t lie about what I’ve seen with my own two eyes, Director. Castiel isn’t lying, I don’t think.”

“You don’t think.”

“I mean, I can’t be sure about all of this demon bullshit, pardon my French, but there was something unnatural about what happened on that flight, with Colleen Baker.”

“Winchester, I’m not saying you’re wrong.”

“Then what are you saying, sir? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I’m saying that, true or not, you’re starting to buy into what Castiel believes. And that,” Skinner stresses, “is the last thing you should be doing.”

“Not much else you guys can do to punish me,” Dean says with a shrug.

“Not much else I can do, no. But there are people higher up than me who have a vested interest in Castiel, and they’re starting to take notice of you, too.”

“Connections,” Dean mutters to himself.

“What?”

“Connections. Cas told me he had connections.”

“And you believe that?”

“Yeah,” Dean admits. “When we,” he pauses, not sure if this is something he’s allowed to tell Skinner, but better to let him know now, Dean figures, than to have to explain everything later, when Dean is in so deep he’s drowning, as everyone thinks he will be, “when we landed in Chicago, a man came for Colleen Baker’s body. Cas knew him, but he never said anything except “Is this her.” He took the body away and no one asked us any questions about her afterwards. It was weird,” Dean concludes, shrugging.

“Did Castiel tell you this man’s name?” Skinner leans forward over his desk. Dean hasn’t ever seen him look this eager, or this interested in what Dean has to say.

Dean has to laugh at that, and his laugh is too bitter for Skinner not to quirk an eyebrow at it, but much to Dean’s relief he doesn’t ask. “Of course not,” Dean says once he’s done, even though it’s probably redundant.

“That’s what I mean, Winchester. People like that are going to start taking notice of you the more you associate yourself with what Castiel is doing.”

“You think he’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Skinner grinds out. “What I do know is that he’s dangerous, and you’re going to get in over your head if you don’t pay attention.”

“Is that all?”

Skinner nods and waves Dean out.

 

Back in the basement Castiel actually looks up when Dean closes the door behind himself and slumps into the extra chair.

“What did Skinner want?”

“Same thing he always wants: to yell at me about my reports,” Dean brushes the question off. Besides, he’s not precisely lying, and for the second time in a week he’s been warned about Castiel, so he doesn’t feel that guilty, he tells himself.

“Are they unsatisfactory?”

“You could say that,” Dean mutters.

For a while neither of them says anything, and it isn’t even awkward, which makes Dean marvel. His silences are always filled with the things he hasn’t said or were supposed to say but refused to. Here, though, as he flicks through a three-year old newspaper that was lying by his shoe and Cas alternately scrolls through something and pecks at his keyboard, they are at a relative peace.

Naturally, Cas opens his mouth.

“Are you going to tell me?” He asks.

“Tell you what?” But Dean has a sinking feeling that he already knows.

“Don’t play stupid,” Cas says, and he sounds almost kind.

“I can’t tell you, Cas.”

“Something like this is going to get in the way of a case eventually, you know. It almost did this last time.”

“I’ll deal with it then.”

“It would be best to deal with it now, while we have the free time.” Cas sounds put out at that, and Dean echoes the sentiment, mentally. He prefers to be working, not sitting and arguing with Cas about his emotional hang-ups.

“And then you can tell me how you have all these connections,” Dean counters.

“Dean,” Castiel warns.

“I’m serious, Cas. You keep your secrets and I’ll keep mine.”

“That’s no way to work,” Cas protests.

“No, it isn’t, is it,” Dean bites back.

“At least tell me something,” Cas says, and his sentence is weirdly half-formed to Dean’s ears, like words are missing, just dropped off into the silence. “Anything,” Cas adds, “just so I can know.”

“I’m going to ask the same from you.”

“I know.”

“My brother,” Dean says, and then he chokes. He hasn’t talked—even so much as mentioned, really—Sam in years. Not that he doesn’t think about him every goddamn day, but he keeps his mouth shut about things like these.

“Oh.” Cas sounds wrecked, like Dean sounded years ago.

“It’s been, god,” Dean stops again, rubs his hand over his face, “years. There still isn’t,” he can’t finish.

“I understand.” Cas must have moved while Dean was talking, because now his hand curves over Dean’s shoulder. Dean thinks about pushing it away, but he won’t, can’t, doesn’t.

“I worked with Uriel, once,” Castiel says, soft. Dean’s thrown for a minute by the sudden, if welcome, change in topic, before he realizes that Cas must be answering Dean’s question.

It’s certainly interesting information and Dean files it away under “maybe I should actually watch out around Cas,” but doesn’t bother to give much else in way of a response. Castiel’s thumb makes a move like it’s trying to rub the knob of his shoulder, and Cas leans closer.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

He sounds like he means it, and, for the moment, that’s good enough for Dean.


	4. Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is super late because it's the first chapter that I had to write from scratch and not just edit. (The first attempt at this story was back in something terrible like 2010.) Anyway this is kind of filler and some FEELINGS ugh. Next chapter will hopefully be more plotty. Also this deviates in wild and awful/hilarious ways from the source episode. Sorry not sorry.

“Let’s go to Chicago,” Dean says instead of “good morning.” Cas actually falters, and Dean knows it’s going to be a good day.

“Not that I don’t like Chicago, but why?”

“A man was found covered in bite marks, with his heart missing. Sounded like our sort of thing.”

“Our sort of thing?”

Dean warms a little bit at Castiel’s tone, there, but pretends he can’t see what’s so strange about his pronoun. “Yeah, ours. Last I remember, we worked together.”

“So one body was found mutilated. That sounds like a local sort of thing.”

“Well, it would,” Dean says, smiling, “but this is after a whole batch of hookers were found with the same sort of injuries. Chicago PD decided to call the Bureau in.”

“And you’re thinking what, exactly?”

“Werewolf, obviously.” Dean grins and Cas rolls his eyes. “No, seriously, Cas, the killings all align with the full moon.”

“I’m surprised, Dean.”

“At what?”

“Your initiative.” Cas looks proud then, sitting behind his desk and actually making eye contact with Dean, for once, instead of his computer. 

“Dude, werewolves are badass,” Dean explains, and he’s totally thrown off when Cas actually bursts into laughter.

Once Cas has himself under control and Dean’s done with his internal thirteen-year old girl moment over how adorable it is that he made Cas laugh, he nods and asks, “Do you have tickets for us?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

 

In the month since that absolutely fucking awful plane crash Dean has been turning over Anna’s and Skinner’s warnings every day, and every time he hasn’t been able to figure out what he should do. On the one hand, Cas has been, comparatively, open and friendly with Dean and Dean’s life is sort of suffering from a dearth of companionship, but on the other hand, Cas did admit to having worked with the terrifying guy who came for Colleen’s body—Uriel, Dean remembers—and they both have creepy names. The only explanation Dean has for that is that they joined a cult or something together back in the day. It’s not exactly a comforting thought. 

Still, Dean hasn’t had this sort of a rapport with a partner of his, ever, he thinks as Cas prattles on about werewolf lore on the way to the airport. He is also exceptionally bad at following other people’s advice, so until there’s a gun pointed at him, he’ll keep saying exactly what he thinks in those stupid reports.

“Dean?” Cas’s voice breaks through his thoughts.

“Hm?”

“I said, do we have any witnesses to any of these killings?”

“No, just the people who found the bodies.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Not for the hookers, no. But a girl called in the guy’s body, and I’ve arranged to talk to her.”

“You are on top of things.”

“You sound surprised,” Dean teases.

“Well,” Cas trails off deliberately and Dean waves one hand at in him in a manner he hopes is threatening.

“Hey! I am very good at my job, I’ll have you know.”

“Which job would that be? Annoying me? Looking at porn on my computer?”

“You know about that?” The words are out of Dean’s mouth before he can stop himself.

“You thought you were being subtle?” Cas is basically shrieking, and if Dean weren’t trying to melt into his seat while driving, it would be hilarious.

“Yes,” he hisses. 

Cas buries his face in his hands and starts muttering, and Dean thinks he hears the Lord’s Prayer in there somewhere.

“Are you praying for my soul?” He ventures.

“For the black-light test I’m going to have to do when we get back.”

Dean almost drives off the road.

;

The medical examiner leads them to the body and shrugs. “Here he is.” She gestures to a sheet-covered body. “There isn’t much I can tell you that wasn’t in the original report, I’m afraid.”

“You have any personal opinions?” Dean asks. Cas lifts the sheet up and his eyes widen.

“Not really,” the examiner admits, “but I’ll tell you no person did that, no way.”

“Wolf, maybe?” Dean flashes her a grin.

“Don’t really have wolves around here,” she retorts, “and we haven’t heard anything from the zoos. It maybe could have been a big fucker of a German shepherd, but, well.”

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Dean teases. She just laughs and winks.

“Have fun, agents.”

“So,” Dean says to Cas once she leaves, “anything interesting under there?”

“Nothing unexpected, if that’s what you’re asking. The heart wasn’t removed cleanly, so I doubt there was any human involvement.”

“Werewolves, then?”

“I still don’t understand why you think they’re so interesting.”

“Seriously, Cas? Forget about those girly-boy werewolves for a minute; I know you like them. I’m talking about awesome shapeshifting beasts. That’s way more badass than that goat-sucking thing we were looking for a couple of weeks ago.”

“El Chupacabra is badass,” Cas mutters. Dean wants to ruffle his hair.

He pushes that urge down and focuses on really giving this body a thorough once over. Just, you know, not while touching it. He’s pretty busy giving the guy’s elbow a good look when Cas appears beside him.

“Well?”

“What?”

“Have you discovered anything important on the victim’ arm, or can we go interview your witness?”

“She’s not my witness,” Dean demurs, but Cas quirks an eyebrow at him and Dean follows him out of the morgue.

 

They meet Madison in her apartment, where she offers them coffee and they turn it down and eventually the three of them settle in the living room. 

“So,” Madison sighs, “where do you want me start.”

“Wherever you’d like,” Dean says.

“Alright. I found Mr. Ratner’s body when I came into work a few days ago. He was—“

“Wait,” Cas interrupts, “you work for the victim?”

“Yes, I’m his secretary,” Madison says. When Cas doesn’t say anything else, she continues. “He was slumped over at his desk. There was blood everywhere; it was a nightmare. It looked like, God, it looked like an animal had gotten at him. He was ripped to shreds.”

“What did you do when you found the body?” Cas asks. Dean shots him a glare; seriously, what the hell does he think she did.

“I called 911,” Madison says. She sounds as confused by the question as Dean.

“Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to harm Mr. Ratner? Any enemies?” Dean takes over the questioning before Cas can put her any more on edge.

“No, I don’t,” Madison starts, but her gaze turns towards the window and Dean follows it. There’s a man standing there, looking up at them. He clearly doesn’t belong. 

“Who was that?” Cas asks. Madison’s face tightens and she sighs.

“That’s my ex-boyfriend, Kevin.”

“Does he come around here often?” Dean takes over and shoots Cas a glare that he hopes says something like ‘stop helping’.

“More than I’d like,” Madison says. “He’s…territorial. It’s why we broke up.”

“Did he ever get physically violent with you?”

“No, but.”

Dean waits. Madison won’t meet his eyes for what feels like ages.

“The night before, the last night Mr. Ratner was alive, Kevin threatened him.”

Cas perks up, so Dean rushes to get the question in first.

“Can you elaborate on that?”

“A few of us—girls from the office—had gone out for drinks and Mr. Ratner was there. I don’t know if he heard us talking and decided to follow or if it was just coincidence. But he’s, well, he was a handsy kind of drunk and he kept asking me to come back to the office with him, and he kept touching me. It was nothing, like, wildly inappropriate, just my hand or my shoulder but he wouldn’t let me alone.” Madison talks with the same dead voice Dean has heard dozens of times before; it never gets easier on the ears.

“And Kevin found out about it?”

“He was at the same bar. I think he’s been following me a lot since we broke up. I’d get a restraining order but it’s a hassle.”

“Did he threaten Mr. Ratner that night?”

“Yeah, he said something. I’d had a couple of drinks so I’m not sure of the exact wording but it was a threat. I don’t know if he said it to Mr. Ratner’s face, but he told me. It’s one of the reasons I left so early.”

“Do you have any idea about Kevin’s whereabouts after you left the bar?”

“No. He keeps tabs on me, not the other way round.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Dean backtracks. Out of the corner of his eyes he sees that Kevin has tried to conceal himself. It, obviously, isn’t working.

“Look, Agent Winchester. I know that I haven’t exactly made Kevin out to be a stable kind of guy, but…”

“But you’re not saying he’s a murderer. Of course not. It’s a hard thing to think about anyone,” Dean says. Madison looks relieved, but Dean continues, “But he’s our best lead right now, so we are going to be looking in to him. So if you see him around, or he says anything to you, let me know. Here’s my number.”

Madison didn’t see them out, but Dean wasn’t really expecting her to. She had too much to think about now. Walking two nosy FBI agents to the door wouldn’t even make this list. In the car he turns to Cas and says, “So it’s definitely the creepy ex-boyfriend, right? We’ll bring him in for questioning and see if we can nail him down.”

“Something doesn’t sit right with me,” Cas murmurs.

“Well, no shit,” Dean says, but pretends to be looking out the window when Cas turns to him.

“Something,” Cas repeats, “something about this seems off.”

“The boyfriend is clearly a creep, and if he’s a wolf—they’re territorial, right? It’d make sense that he’d go after her boss, especially if she was as uncomfortable as I think she probably was.”

“It’s not the motive,” Cas says.

“Then enlighten me, Cas, because I have no idea.”

“How did Kevin get into Mr. Ratner’s office?”

“Well, Cas, he’s a werewolf, so I don’t think that was really an issue for him.”

“But there wasn’t any real property damage. None of the doors were damaged.”

“Maybe he,” Dean stops himself halfway through, as he realizes Cas’s point.

“Exactly. We need to think about who could get in to the building as a human.”

“And has enough of a grudge to rip his heart out as a wolf.” Dean thinks he knows where this is going. He really hopes he’s wrong.

Cas gives him a long and measured look but says nothing else as they drive back to their hotel. Dean drums his fingers on the steering wheel and tries to ignore the sick feeling creeping up the back of his throat. Madison is a good woman, Dean can tell. She wouldn’t ever—consciously—rip anyone’s still-beating heart out of their chest. There must be someone else, someone they haven’t thought of yet. Maybe Ratner had a jealous ex, or a long-time rival that he had never told Madison about. The more Dean turned it over in his head, though, the more he realized Cas was probably right.

“We need to give her the benefit of the doubt, though,” Dean says over dinner.

“That could be dangerous,” Cas replies once he’s finished his enormous mouthful of burger.

“Assuming she’s a werewolf could be just as dangerous!”

“For her,” Cas says. 

“Yeah, Cas, for her. What the hell did you think I meant?”

“If she is the werewolf, and we don’t take immediate action, there will be more lives at stake than just hers.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” Dean says, and slams his hands on the table. 

“Well I’m sorry that you don’t feel comfortable making these kinds of calls.”

“What kinds of calls are you talking about exactly, Cas?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“So calls that could ruin the life of an innocent woman?”

“Or that could save the lives of the actual innocents she’s going to prey upon.”

“That doesn’t make it right!” Dean has to stand now, and pace around the room to avoid eye contact with Cas, who’s sitting calmly at the table.

“Is it because she’s an attractive woman?”

“What?” Dean stops, one had in his hair.

“Is that why you won’t believe she could be the werewolf?”

“I think she could be, Cas, I never said otherwise. But I don’t think that means she deserves to be treated like one without enough proof.”

“Right,” Cas agrees, “but you’re more willing to protect her at the expensive of others than the other way around. Is that because you found her attractive?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’re avoiding the question,” Cas growls.

“No, I’m pointing out that it’s not the sort of thing you should be asking about.”

“Right,” Cas says, “so that’s a yes.”

“That’s a fuck off,” Dean snaps back, and then something hits him. “Are you jealous, Cas?”

Cas, to his credit, doesn’t flush, but Dean is pretty sure he’s hit the mark. One of Castiel’s eyebrows raises. “Do you want me to be?” He sounds too put together, and Dean fumbles for an answer.

“Ok, that may have backfired on me.”

“Only a little.”

“Yeah, she’s hot, but that’s not what matters. What matters is—“

“That we don’t have absolute proof, Dean, you’ve said it a million times.”

“Then start listening!”

“When you start thinking, maybe I will,” Cas snaps. He’s finally starting to raise his voice. “You can’t save everyone, Dean, and not everyone is innocent. No matter how beautiful they may be.”

Dean honestly doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just sits down on one of the beds and looks at his hands. On some level, he knows that Cas is right. He doesn’t know when he lost his edge, when it became so hard for him to make these kinds of decisions. He blames Cas, not just because that’s sort of his go-to for anything that he isn’t comfortable with, but because this might actually be Cas’s fault. Dean isn’t a soft person; he’s cold and secretive and he can turn on his charm for witnesses and victims but that’s all it is: charm. He knows on some level that those people are suffering and he’s always been cognizant of that but he can abstract away from it, too, not let himself get caught up in their lives.

Cas, though, is a different animal. As far as Dean can tell, he is some kind of robot or alien or something because Cas cannot connect to anyone. Except for maybe Dean, but Dean has compartmentalized that realization and bundled it away with a lot of other things about his partnership with Castiel that make him uncomfortable. Cas talks about people like he isn’t one of them, and that makes Dean nervous. He must have developed this softness as an antidote to Cas’s callousness. It’s the only thing Dean can think of.

They don’t talk until they’ve both finished eating, and then Dean catches Cas’s eyes and they both kind of nod and look away at the same time, which is as close to an apology as either of them is willing to get.

“So,” Dean starts.

“We need to figure out how we went from dead prostitutes to a dead lawyer,” Cas says.

“I’ve got a couple of jokes that could explain it, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

Cas laughs, and Dean feels like he’s won something.

;

The next day , Kevin is dead.

“It’s not even the fucking full moon tonight,” Dean swears.

“Some werewolf myths claim that a period of three days on either side of the moon governs the change,” Cas tells him. Cas is, of course, perfectly calm and not gloating even a little bit, which is way more infuriating than the “I told you so” Dean was expecting. Actually, now that he thinks about it, Cas probably knows all that.

“So we have, what, four more days?”

“Something like that.” Cas goes silent after that and Dean can feel his gaze on the back of his neck.

“I know, Cas,” Dean says. He knows better than to try and outwait Cas. 

“You can be the one to talk to her, if you wish.”

“That would probably be for the best, since you’ll probably just do some sort of “Sit, stay, good dog” routine.”

“I have a little more sensitivity than that.”

“Really.”

“Really. I went to a seminar once, you know.”

“Oh my god, no way”

“Several years ago, before Anna came to work with me.”

“So, wait. You were worse than this? Like, this is the new, improved, sensitive Castiel?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Cas smirks and Dean feels a smile spread across his face despite his best intentions. 

The smile stays with him for the first five minutes of his drive to Madison’s house. Cas had insisted he take the car because, “I am much better with public transportation than you, Dean,” which may be true, but Dean doesn’t have to like it.

He wonders what to say to her, if she knows at all what she’s been doing. If she does, then maybe Dean’s words will come as a relief. If she doesn’t, she’ll probably call him crazy and try to get in touch with the authorities. When you walk around saying crazy shit, it helps to be the authorities. Should he ask her, first, about Kevin? Should he ask her if Kevin had hung around, if he had come into her home, if he had touched her, if she had screamed or threatened him? Maybe he should be more general: where were you last night? What did you do after my partner and I left?

When he rings her bell and she ushers him into the living room, Dean forgets everything he was going to say. As it turns out, none of that matters, because Madison sits down across from him and says,

“Kevin’s dead, isn’t he?”

Dean lets out a heavy sigh and meets Madison’s eyes. “Yes.”

“He was killed the same way Mr. Ratner was, wasn’t he?”

Technically, she shouldn’t know this, and Dean shouldn’t tell her, but it’s too late and she deserves at least this. “Yes.”

Madison looks down at her hands. “I know this is going to sound crazy, but I think I killed them.”

Dean holds his breath and waits for her to continue.

“I remember it, somehow. It was like a fugue state,” she says.

“You remember killing them? Madison, those bodies were destroyed. Their hearts were ripped out.”

“I know,” she tells him. “That’s what I remember.” She doesn’t blink as she stares Dean down.

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“The truth!” She’s on the verge of really screaming. Dean can see the anger corded in her neck and burning in her eyes.

“Fine, fine,” he gives in. “You killed those men. Is that what you want to hear? You killed them, and I know you killed them and my partner knows you killed them.”

“He knew yesterday,” Madison says.

“You could tell?”

“Not exactly, but I knew he thought I was up to something. He kept giving me weird looks.”

“Dammit, Cas. I’m sorry about that. He, uh, his people skills aren’t great.”

“It’s fine,” Madison says. “So are you going to arrest me?”

“Uh,” Dean says. He doesn’t actually know what protocol is here. Well, he knows what the law says he should do, but the law is not in possession of all of the facts. “Let’s come back to that one. Do you remember how you killed these men?”

Madison looks stricken. “My bare hands,” she whispers. “I tore them apart.”

She knows, Dean thinks, the knowledge blindsiding him. Of course she knows, this is her body, this is her mind, these are her memories. “Madison,” he says, but then she’s sobbing in great wracking motions into her hands and Dean doesn’t know what to do but gross the divide and sit beside her and wrap his arms around her thin shoulders—her frail, human shoulders—and let her shift her head onto his shoulder and cry herself dry.

Later, as Dean rises to leave, she asks, “Will it happen again?”

Dean can’t bear to answer her.

;

Dean calls Cas in the car and Cas confirms everything: Kevin’s heart is missing, he was found near Madison’s neighborhood, and no one can say with any certainty what he was doing or what happened to him. When he’s done rattling off the facts Cas sits on the other end of the line and Dean knows exactly what he’s waiting for.

“She knows, Cas. I didn’t even have to tell her. She remembers killing both of them with her bare hands.”

“That’s remarkable,” Cas says, like he’s dealing with something under a fucking microscope. “Very few people remember their changes.”

“Wow, Cas, that’s great. That’s really fucking exciting. What are we going to do with her?”

“I don’t know,” Cas sighs. “We should talk about this back at the hotel.”

Dean agrees, and then stops for pizza along the way. He hopes, vindictively, that Cas is waiting for him in their room, maybe pacing back and forth and getting angrier and angrier. Dean can imagine his face with its furrowed brows and how his eyes seem brighter when he’s angry, the tight draw of his mouth and, okay, this might be getting a little bit out of hand.

Cas is waiting when Dean gets back, but Dean still feels pretty awkward about his own imagination so he apologizes and shoves the pizza onto the table without further comment.

“My superiors are going to advise us to kill her,” Cas says once they’ve polished off two pieces each. As far as openers go, Dean hasn’t heard many that are worse.

“Your superiors, Cas? Last time I checked we worked for the same people.”

“Don’t be dense,” Cas replies.

“I’m not. I can’t imagine Skinner ordering us to kill her. I mean, I would think they’d at least want her for sketchy research purposes.”

Cas shakes his head. Dean thinks he looks almost sad. “No,” he says, quiet, “they wouldn’t want to study this. Such an abomination is of no interest to them.”

“She’s not—“

“They would consider her as such.”

“Who’s they?”

“My superiors.”

“Cas, come on, you have to give me more than this. I thought you trusted me.”

Cas looks absolutely stricken. “I do, Dean, but this is beyond your control. Anything you know will only endanger you further.”

“I know,” Dean tells him with a shrug, “I’ve been warned.”

“By whom?” Cas looks honestly worried, which makes Dean start to worry, too.

“Skinner, Anna.”

“No one else? No one you’d never seen before?”

“No, Cas. Way to make this sound super creepy.”

“Maybe it is ‘super ‘creepy’.” Dean can practically hear the scare quotes, and Cas’s lips are turned upwards, so the knot in his stomach starts to dissolve.

“This doesn’t mean you can keep it a secret from me, Cas. I don’t care if it puts me in danger. I’m your partner, and you said you trust me, so I deserve to know.”

Cas looks at Dean, and then down at his hands where they lie in his lap, and then back to Dean. “Fine. When all of this is done, I will tell you what you want to know.”

;

Dean heads back to Madison’s before the moon rises and finds her waiting for him at the front door. She kisses him hard on the mouth and says “I don’t want to be alone, Dean. I hate this so much, being scared of myself. Please don’t let me do this alone.” So Dean follows her back to her bedroom and she pushes him down and Dean is really enjoying himself when suddenly Cas’s voice is in his head.

Is it because she’s attractive?

It hits Dean like a truck that Cas was jealous, maybe just a little bit, so far below the surface that he didn’t consciously know it. He pulls away from Madison and nudges her until she climbs off of him. His hands are shaking a little.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“We shouldn’t do this,” Dean tells her. “I’ll stay with you, of course, but we shouldn’t do this. Not with,” Dean waves towards the window in a gesture he hopes conveys something like “the moon, your lycanthropy, the bloody murders associated with said lycanthropy, “hanging over our heads.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.” Madison sits down beside him and Dean curves an arm around her shoulders in a manner he hopes is strictly platonic.

“The full moon isn’t until tomorrow, so why is this happening now?” Madison asks.

“According to my partner, some types of werewolves change at any point within three days of a full moon.”

“There are types of werewolves?”

“Apparently? I’m not really sure.”

“More importantly,” she says, “he said ‘at any point’, right?”

“Yeah.” Dean isn’t sure where she’s going with this.

“So maybe I won’t change tonight. Maybe it’s completely random. Maybe I attacked Mr. Ratner and Kevin because they were threatening and harassing me, so…”

“So maybe this is something you can control,” Dean finishes for her. It’s a thought, and maybe it could save her.

“If I don’t change tonight,” Madison tells him, “I think I’ll be okay. Or, rather, if I don’t kill anyone. That’s what’s really important, right?”

“Right,” Dean agrees. They don’t talk about what will happen if she does kill someone, and at some point Dean feels himself falling asleep, and before he can fight it he’s completely out.

He wakes up at 4:30 to the weird, half-dawn light seeping in through the windows—seriously, Chicago, what the fuck it’s only 4:30— and Madison’s silhouette. It’s perfectly human but she’s making a strange sobbing noise that Dean has never heard before and his gun is in her hand. 

“Madison? Madison, what’s wrong?”

She turns to face him and that’s really answer enough; her hands are shaking and there’s blood on her face, all over her mouth and up one high cheekbone, almost touching the corner of her eye. She looks completely feral.

“Oh my god,” Dean breaths out. Madison lifts the gun but her hands are shaking too badly for her to get a solid shot in, Dean knows. “Madison, sweetheart, put down the gun. You don’t have to do this.”

“I do, Dean, I do,” she tells him. Her voice is hoarse, like she’s been screaming—howling, Dean’s brain supplies—all night.

“No. This isn’t the answer, Madison. Put down the gun.”

“I didn’t even know his name,” she says, “but I killed him anyway, Dean. I’m a monster!”

“No,” he says again, harsher, and steps into her space to grab her arms, “you aren’t a monster.”

“I’ve killed three people,” Madison says, and her eyes get a little crazy at that. The blood doesn’t help the effect, either.

“That wasn’t you.”

“Don’t you get it?” she pleads, “That is me. It’s just another part of me that I can’t control and I didn’t ask for it but don’t you dare tell me it isn’t me. I know who I am.”

For some reason this conversation has calmed her nerves and steadied her hands, and in a swift, slick motion Madison pushes Dean away and raises the gun to her temple and before Dean can reach her the sharp crack of a gunshot rings out and it’s over.

;

Dean wouldn’t leave her apartment until Cas forced him out. Cas has a surprisingly strong grip and not a lot of scruples when it comes to fighting dirty. He does, however, have enough sense not to ask Dean about what happened until they’re back in the basement trying to write up their reports. Rather, they’re trying to write up Dean’s report in a way that doesn’t tell Skinner and the rest of upstairs that this is all Dean’s fault for falling asleep in a werewolf’s bed and leaving his gun on the nightstand.

Cas, because he’s some kind of mind reader, says, “It wasn’t your fault.”

“She shot herself with my gun. How is that not my fault?”

“She would have found some other way to do it. You know that.”

“Not really a comforting thought, Cas. F for effort.”

“Would it make you feel better if I kept my promise and explained some things to you?”

“Probably not; that’s what the therapy is for, but yeah, go for it anyway.”

Cas looks lost, but soon finds his feet and says, “There is a conspiracy, at the highest levels of our government. It avoids the transiency of elected officials; they know nothing of it. Rather it is controlled by a shadow cabal of men who have held power without drawing attention to themselves for some time. Uriel is one of those men, though by no means one of the ringleaders.”

“Whoa, slow down there, crazy eyes.”

“You wanted to know,” Cas says, petulant.

“Yeah, and I still do. I just wasn’t expecting you to turn it up to eleven, that’s all.”

Cas wrinkles his nose and Dean thinks he probably didn’t get the reference, but he keeps talking. “These men have taken it upon themselves to direct the fate of the nation, of the world; do not think that there is no international component because there is, but for reasons beyond any of us the heart of the matter is in the states.”

“Not that this isn’t all really exciting in a sort of late-night History Channel kind of way,” Dean interrupts, “but can you cut the cryptic bullshit and tell me what you actually mean?”

Cas sighs like Dean is asking him to do something legitimately difficult. And maybe he is; Cas always talks around things so it might be a condition or something. Not that Dean cares at all right now, not with the afterimage of Madison’s body falling to the carpet burned into the backs of his eyelids. 

“Several years ago, before I came to work with them, they made a deal.”

Dean has a lot of fucking questions all of a sudden.

“With the Devil,” Cas adds, which gives Dean about three thousand new questions to replace the one Cas just answered.

“Like, the actual devil?”

“Well, a representative of his.” Cas won’t meets Deans eyes, so he must know how fucking lunatic this sounds.

“You’re not messing around.”

“No. Is it really so hard to believe, after all you’ve seen?”

“Cas, I’ve seen like four things you claim are demons, one werewolf and a lot of tabloid-esque bullshit.”

“You need to learn to have some faith, then,” Cas tells him, “if everything you’ve seen hasn’t convinced you that the world you thought you knew is something entirely different.”

“That doesn’t mean I need to start believing in the devil, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you’ve got a devil, a devil proper, right, like Lucifer, then you’ve got to have angels and you’ve got to have God.”

“Is that so bad?”

Dean honestly doesn’t know what to say to that, so he goes with his gut. “Yeah, Cas, it is.”

Castiel’s eyes flash and he stands in a rush. “Fine. If you don’t want to believe it, then I don’t need to tell you anything else. Have fun with your report,” he says, and stalks out.

Dean watches him leave and doesn’t breathe until the door is closed.


	5. Paper Hearts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't even know how to explain this. (or, plot finally arrives, sort of)

Dean is lying in bed with his hand over his eyes, debating the merits of whiskey versus Tylenol PM as the sleep aid for the night. He can’t stop thinking about Sam and that terrible hot Tuesday afternoon when Dean turned his back for five fucking minutes and lost everything. He knows there’s no way he’ll sleep naturally tonight, so he drags his hand off his face and prepares to dig through the liquor cabinet.

There is a ball of light hovering above his bed.

Dean covers his eyes back up and takes several deep breaths through his nose. When he removes his hand the light is still there. It seems insistent, if a ball of light can really seem like anything other than a hallucination. The ball drifts towards his bedroom door and Dean figures, fuck it, he’s not going to sleep anyway, so he might as well follow this thing. 

The light leads him out of his apartment and down the street all the way into the woods that Dean had always promised himself he would walk through one day, but had never bothered to because Dean actually didn’t care much for nature or nature walks or any of the bullshit. He must walk for ten or twenty minutes, or maybe thirty—Dean honestly can’t tell; time means nothing to him right now. 

The light eventually stops, and when Dean does nothing but stare at it, it starts to lower itself down towards the earth again and again. Dean tries doing squats with it, first, but the lights just gets more aggressive in its movements. He tried digging, then, and the light hovers above his shoulder as he does so. If anything, it seems like it’s trying to help.

The soil is soft and loamy, and moves easily in Dean’s hands. At first there’s nothing but sticks and small bugs and other gross things Dean doesn’t want to be touching, but the he feels something hard and a little rough. It’s a texture he knows by heart. Bone, and then, shifting his hand, cloth. His movements become frantic and scrabbling and soon he can see the first bits of bone and they’re small, they’re so small oh God, he thinks, these are children’s bones.

;

“I can’t explain it,” is what Dean tells Skinner when he’s pulled into the A.D’s office first thing that morning. “I just knew the body was there.”

“Look, Winchester, I believe you, but that kind of thing isn’t going to hold up in an investigation.”

“What investigation? We know who did it, sir, and don’t tell me anyone’s pretending otherwise.”

Skinner sighs. “No, Winchester, they’re not. I’m just trying to look out for you. If you can’t keep your head during this, I’ll pull you. You’re not in Violent Crimes anymore. I had to pull a couple of strings to get you this case anyway.”

“It’s mine by right,” Dean tells him, “I found the body in the woods, and I worked this case before—“ he stops.

“Exactly, Winchester. Tread carefully.”

Dean nods and stalks out of the office.

;

Cas, for once, is waiting for Dean to come in. 

“I really don’t want to talk about it,” Dean says, and Cas visibly wilts. He perks back up an instant later and says, 

“That’s really too bad, Dean, because I need to know what’s going on, since we’re going to be working this case together.”

“Cas, please, don’t push it.”

“Dean,” Cas hisses, “I revealed the secrets of the greatest conspiracy that has ever threatened the American people to you, and you won’t tell me the details of a case I’m going to be work on.”

Dean sighs and pinches his nose. He knows Cas has a point, knows they’ve been working on the trust issues and being a better team and maybe staring into each other’s eyes in ways that no one is totally comfortable talking about yet, especially not Dean. He’s already gone far outside of his comfort zone for Cas. Cas is the first person Dean has told about Sam in his entire life. He spent his time in Violent Crimes talking increasingly elaborate circles around his little brother until it came back and bit him in the ass. And now, of course, the same fucking problem, the same fucking case is here to ruin everything. Again.

Cas gets up in his personal space, which isn’t really a surprise because Cas doesn’t have a great understanding of personal space in general, and places a hand on Dean’s shoulder. His palm is warm and heavy, a grounding heat, an anchor, and Dean breathes deep and holds Cas’s wrist. He thinks his initial intent was to remove Cas’s hand because he’s uncomfortable with how comfortable he is with this casual contact, but that gets lost somewhere, and Dean’s hand stays. He rubs his thumb over the knob of bone on Cas’s wrist, and starts to speak.

“The body I found in the woods this morning,” he says, and stops. He feels weak, even though he knows it’s stupid and that finding children’s bodies in the woods is like, primo therapy material. Cas shifts closer and tells him he knows, he understands, and Dean decides it’s okay to skip that part.

“The perp is, I guess I should explain differently. Based on the evidence, there was a heart cut out of the dress the girl was wearing, we know who did it—John Lee Roche. He’s been behind bars for three years. I was part of the team that put him away. If I’m being honest, I was the one who finally cracked it, but that’s not the point. When we got him, we’d found thirteen bodies, thirteen kids in clothes with hearts cut out of them, and he confessed, but he always seemed so fucking smug about the whole thing, claimed he had even more victims but we thought he was just being an asshole. I guess I know why, now. He was telling the truth. There are more of them out there, god knows how many more.”

Cas hums low in his throat. He’s gotten even closer; his head is basically resting against Dean’s collarbones, but Dean can’t quite bring himself to care. Cas has to know there’s more, that there are parts of this Dean isn’t sharing, but he lets it go, for once. They move apart, slowly. Dean refuses to look at Cas until they’re both seated and Dean has a measure of composure.

“So what’s your first move?”

“Talk to Roche. I don’t want to, but I’ve got to. He might be willing to talk about the other victims, or at least give me some accidental help while he’s mocking me.” Cas looks a little sad at that, and Dean doesn’t want a repeat performance of their pseudo-hug so he adds, “I’m going to try to get him to tell me where the hearts are.”

“The hearts?”

“Yeah. I told you he cut hearts out of their clothing, right? The holes are all there, and he says he did it, but we never actually found the damn things. So if I can find them…”

“You’ll know for sure how many victims there were.”

“Exactly. We didn’t think about it during the initial arrest, we were too busy just trying to get him behind bars as fast as possible, but now I think it might be more important.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

Dean honestly didn’t know the answer to that. On the one hand, Cas was a calming presence and he had a way of staring down criminals that actually seemed to make them uncomfortable, and his alien nature made him, sometimes, a bizarrely effective questioner. On the other, Roche was a manipulative bastard and even if Cas was immune to that sort of thing, Dean certainly wasn’t. Roche would be looking to mess with him anyway, and bringing someone else, someone he was clearly attached to, would give him the perfect ammunition.

“It’s fine if you say no, I understand these things can be difficult.”

“What things?” Oh, thank God Cas was giving him an excuse to turn this into a fight so he could avoid explaining exactly why he didn’t want Cas around Roche, why Roche got under his skin so well, why Dean abso-fucking-lutely had to keep his cool during this case.

“Revisiting old cases, knowing that you did something wrong the first time around, or simply forgot to do something. Talking to men like Roche, men that it is hard to view as anything other than evil. Talking to a killer of children, when I know,” and here Cas cuts Dean off before Dean can even start yelling at him, “I know, Dean. And I’m sure Skinner knows too, doesn’t he?” 

Dean refuses to answer.

“You may not like it, but you need someone else. As much as you may hate my, what was it, robotic exterior, you could use someone with less emotional attachment to the case.”

Dean wants to hate Cas so, so badly. He wants to hate his argument, his “robotic exterior”, the way his eyes looked sad when he said that, and a thousand other little things that normally he never registered, but Cas was also right, and Dean knew it. There was more on the line here than just his manly pride.

“Alright, but just…be careful. Roche plays mind games.” 

Cas raises an eyebrow.

“Valid point, but he won’t be playing them with you.”

“I have been told that my presence can be offputting, so maybe that will throw him off his game.”

“Maybe,” Dean agrees. He thinks for a second and adds, “But don’t, don’t say that kind of shit, Cas. I like your presence.” Cas ducks his head to hide what Dean is pretty sure is a smile.

“So,” he says, and clears his throat, “let’s get going. If I wait any longer I’m never gonna make it there.”

;

Roche, much to Dean’s perpetual disgust, isn’t in solitary. He is, in fact, a model prisoner: well-behaved, clean, spends most of his time playing basketball or reading. If Dean had his way, well, if Dean had his way Roche would have fried in the chair the instant the judge handed down a guilty verdict, but Dean rarely gets his way.

The guard tells them Roche is on the basketball court, and doesn’t seem particularly disturbed by the fact, so Dean guesses it must be prison protocol to let psychopaths roam free. Cas, of course, doesn’t bat an eye. They get to the court, where Roche is practicing his free throws, going through the same motion over and over again with a perfectly serene look on his face. Dean stays in the doorway watching, and Cas hovers at his elbow. Roche is a tall man, and thin but certainly not gaunt. His face has aged dramatically since Dean last saw him, and that gives Dean a mean little curl of pleasure. Even aged he has the quintessential serial killer face, so calm and bland that you wouldn’t give it a second thought, but once the teeming evil beneath the mask revealed itself, every wrinkle seemed to have been screaming all along “Get out, get out, run while you still can.”

Cas presses his fingers into Dean’s back, moving him forward just enough to draw Roche’s attention. He finishes his shot—perfect, nothing but net—and grins at Dean.

“Roche,” Dean growls. He wants to get this over with as fast as possible.

“Dean, how lovely to see you, and you’ve brought someone new.” Roche smiles at Cas and Dean is struck with a blinding urge to hit Roche.

Cas doesn’t react beyond saying, “I’m Castiel.”

“The angel of Thursday. Religious parents?”

“Not quite,” Cas says, and inclines his head. “But I don’t think that’s really the topic at hand.”

“You’re probably right. Now, Dean, what was it you wanted to see me about?”

Dean flounders for a moment, looking for the right words. “We found another one, Roche. I want the truth out of you: how many are there?”

“Which one?”

“You don’t get to ask the questions here, Roche. Now tell me, how many are there?”

“More, certainly. If you had the hearts, you’d already know the answer. But you haven’t found those yet, have you?”

“I don’t need your sick little trophies, not when I’ve got you right here, with nowhere else to go.”

“Do you think I’m going to crack, Dean? There’s nothing else you can do to me.” Roche smirks. 

“Oh, there’s plenty I can still do to you,” Dean says, and steps closer. Cas reaches out a warning hand but Dean ignores it.

“Not if you want to keep the pretty little badge of yours,” Roche says.

Dean is honestly too angry to speak or move, and even if he does manage to calm himself down enough to regain muscle control his first impulse is going to be violent. He can hear Cas breathing behind him and wonders what Cas will do when Dean kills Roche, right here. It’s a favorite fantasy of his, well-worn. He hasn’t visited it lately, but every detail is there, still, the way he imagined Roche’s body would fall, the sound of a bullet tearing through his skull, or the feeling of his throat beneath Dean’s hands. 

Suddenly, Roche’s voice cuts through the fog of rage. “Tell you what, Dean, I like this little angel on your shoulder, so I’ll give you a hint about the hearts.”

Dean waits.

“I always kept them with me, in a Mad Hat.”

“Your generosity amazes me,” Dean manages, and leaves before he loses control.

Cas follows him seconds later, and once they’re outside he says, “I understand why you weren’t looking forward to seeing him. He’s…unsettling.”

“Took a shine to you, though.”

“Is that supposed to comfort me?”

“Good point,” Dean chuckles. “What was all that angel of Thursday stuff, though?”

“The truth,” Cas says, “though I’m surprised he recognized the name. Very few do, really. Or very few laypeople. Those in the religious offices stand a better chance.”

“Your parents named you after an angel no one has ever heard of?”

Cas smiles. “Like I said, not exactly.”

“C’mon, Cas, I’ve got enough riddles on my plate, here.”

“So I should just reveal all my secrets, is that it?” 

Cas’s tone is joking but Dean’s answer is anything but.

“Yes.”

Cas looks at him out of the corner of his eye. He’s not smiling anymore, but he doesn’t look angry either. “Alright. It isn’t my given name. I took it a long time ago.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

Now Cas is smiling again, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes like it did before. “Did you think Uriel’s given name was Uriel, too?”

Dean wants to protest at the non sequitur that he knows should make sense to him, and probably would, if Roche hadn’t scrambled his brain, but Cas takes off for the car without looking back, and Dean has to jog to catch up.

;

They wait in the basement for forensics to get back to them on the identity of the victim. Dean hasn’t said anything since they left the jail because he honestly can’t think of anything to say that isn’t embarrassingly revealing or inappropriate or just kind of stupid. Cas hasn’t spoken because he’s a reticent motherfucker anyway, or so Dean figures.

Just then though, Cas looks up and, because he lives to ruin Dean’s theories, asks, “How did you find the body?”

“Wandering in the woods,” Dean says, in as natural a tone as he can drum up.

“You went into the woods in the middle of the night and just happened to start digging where this man had buried a body?”

“You can believe in aliens, but not my story?”

“I’m open minded, not stupid, Dean. What really happened?”

“You can’t tell anyone, Cas. I’m already on thin ice with Skinner.”

“Of course.”

“There was, like, a ball of light. I saw it in my room when I was trying to go to sleep, and it lead me out into the woods, and showed me where to dig.”

“I believe you,” Cas says, but he looks concerned.

“I know it sounds crazy, like I was having some sort of acid trip. That’s why no one else can know.”

“No it, it sounds sort of familiar to me. I think I’ve read about lights like those, somewhere.” Cas shuffles through the folders on his desk, though Dean doesn’t know how that’s going to help; Cas’s desk is where useless sheets of paper go to die.

“What color was the light?”

“Um, it was just sort of light? I guess white or something.”

“Fool’s fire,” Cas blurts.

“Excuse me?”

“Will o’ the wisp, fairy light, fool’s fire, all the same. It’s, in legend, a light that leads travelers away from safe paths in swamps and bogs.”

“Well, my room’s not a swamp, no matter what Anna might tell you, so that’s not what it was.”

“Science has, of course, disproven the theory—it’s swamp gas, phosphorous and something,” Cas waves his hand, “but that doesn’t mean there aren’t also real will o’ the wisps.”

“Uh, Cas, not that this isn’t fascinating, but there are bigger fish to fry, here.”

“We can’t go on without the forensics. I’m simply killing time.”

“You could help me figure out what the hell a Mad Hat is.”

“Concentrate on the first part. He always had them with him.”

“Right,” Dean says. He kind of hates how Cas sounds like a teacher when he tells Dean that, but figures it’s just because Cas is so focused on this crazy fairy light thing to pay attention to how he sounds. 

Roche was a travelling salesman. That was how he was able to escape capture so long, and leave such a long trail of murdered children across so many states, so the hearts wouldn’t be in a house of a chest or anything like that. They’d be in something Roche kept in the car. They’d searched the car, though, when they caught him, collected everything, turned it over and over again and never come up with anything more. Roche had never asked after his effects, either, and Dean knows serial killers well enough to know that if the hearts had been with the things taken for evidence, Roche would have been concerned. 

They’d searched the entire fucking car, Dean knew for a fact. They’d gone under the seats and through the trunk and under the carpeting. There hadn’t been anything at all. But the key has to be in the car; he’d driven the same car for his entire career. 

Alright, fuck that part. What was a Mad Hat? Did cars wear hats? Dean was pretty sure they didn’t, and he knew cars. His dad had worked as a mechanic in Lawrence before…before everything changed, and later he had taught Dean everything he knew. It wasn’t a reference to the engine or anything like that. Dean tried to conjure the car up in his mind, white and dirty, old and worn from the years Roche spent travelling all over the country. It was an El Camino, with a cap on it. Dean almost moves on from that thought, because he’s seen Roche’s car in his mind a million times.

This is it, though, this has to be it. The car has had the cap for as long as Dean had known about Roche, so there’s no reason to think it was a new addition, not with its poor condition. Dean gears up to tell Cas about his discovery in the hopes that it will jerk him away from his latest fascination, but the girl from forensics comes in right then.

“Sorry for intruding,” she says, “but I didn’t know how else to get in touch with you.”

“It’s fine,” Cas tells her. “You can just tell us everything here.”

“Right, um,” she stammers. Dean notices that she’s young. She’s probably new and maybe she’s heard some rumors about crazy Castiel, and maybe some about Dean, too, but she hasn’t been around long enough to know that rumor and whatever opinions you hold about your coworkers can never control how you act in front of them. It’s vaguely endearing.

“We’ve identified the body. It’s, her name is, was Emily Diewold. She went missing in 1993. We’ve, uh, got an address for her father. He doesn’t live too far away.”

“That can’t be right,” Dean says. Cas and the forensics girl both look at him with wide eyes. “Roche didn’t start killing until 1996.”

“Thank you,” Cas tells the forensics girl, and he gets up and takes the address from her. “I’ll deal with him.” 

She nods and beats a hasty retreat.

“I’m telling you, Cas, they have to be wrong.”

“I don’t think they are. They wouldn’t fumble something like this. It had to have been confirmed with the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”

“That would mean that Roche started killing at least three years earlier than we thought. There could be so many more victims, Cas. We have to get those hearts.”

“We do,” Cas agrees, “but I think we should go to see Mr. Diewold first.”

“Right,” Dean says. He swallows around the sudden lump in his throat. When they had been on Roche’s trail the first time Dean had never been the one to deliver the news. Everyone on the case had seen how brittle he was and had gone out of their way to keep him from breaking halfway through the pursuit. There was no way he could let Cas handle this one, though.

“I’ll drive,” Cas says.

Dean doesn’t argue.

;

Mr. Diewold’s house is in what is basically a glorified DC suburb, on a cute cul-de-sac. It’s one story, with a welcome mat in front of the door and a car in the driveway. Cas parks on the curb and Dean grabs the evidence, the little girl’s pajamas and steels himself. Cas gets out of the car before he can manage that, and opens Dean’s door. 

“I’m not your girlfriend, Cas,” Dean grumbles.

“You can chastise me for it later,” Cas says, “but you have a job to do, and you need to do it.” 

A bolt of anger surges through Dean and it is exactly what he needs to get out of the car and onto the Diewolds’ doorstep. Cas rings the bell for him without even asking, and then takes a step back.

A balding man probably in his fifties answers the door. Dean can see his face change as he processes their suits, their blank faces, the black car on the street.

“What do you want?” He asks. He’s suspicious, and Dean doesn’t blame him.

“Mr. Diewold, my name is Dean Winchester. I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Could I have a minute of your time?”

“I haven’t done anything,” the man tells Dean, and Dean’s eyes flicker down reflexively to the clothes in his arms. Diewold’s eyes follow, and he makes a sound in between a sob and a whimper. He must have those clothes memorized, Dean thinks, he must know every inch of that pattern by heart. Dean can remember down to the finest-grained detail, what Sammy had been wearing the last time Dean ever saw him. He can’t imagine what he would do in this man’s position. Shut the door, probably.

To his credit, Mr. Diewold doesn’t shut the door in Dean’s face. He doesn’t say anything, either. He stares down at his daughter’s clothes as Dean’s mouth moves but no words come out. Finally, he stretches his hands out and says, “I’m so sorry.”

“Do you?” He can’t even finish the question, but Dean knows what he wants to ask.

“Yes. He’s in jail. He has been for years. We only just—we didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

Diewold looks at him now. His eyes are blank. “How many more parents are you going to have to visit?”

Dean’s answer catches in his throat. That’s the question he’s been avoiding this whole time. Thinking about the families of victims was the roughest part of Violent Crimes, at least half of the department agreed, and it had always been rougher on Dean but it was even worse when the victims were kids. It turned normal people crazy to hear that their children were really and truly gone, that they didn’t have a daughter or son but a tragedy instead. If it had been his dad on the other side of the door, Dean doesn’t know, not really, whenever he tries to imagine it all he can see is black. 

Mr. Diewold is still waiting for his answer, but Dean doesn’t have one. 

Cas places a hand on his shoulder and whispers, “Go back to the car.” Dean would argue with him but Cas’s voice is stern and Dean is weak. Once he sits down he feels a little better, and he watches Cas talking with his same blank robot face. Diewold doesn’t look angry, though, so Dean figures Cas hasn’t done anything too terrible.

When Cas gets back they both pretend nothing happened, and drive back to the Bureau.

;

“We need to find Roche’s car,” Dean says in lieu of “thank you”.

“Alright.”

“It’s an El Camino. We sent it to impound right after Roche was caught, but the car was in pretty good condition—he knew his way around a vehicle, I’ll give him that—so there’s a good chance someone bought it. 

“Let me make a few calls,” Cas says, and smiles. 

Dean heads out in search of coffee and something to distract him from the case. He finds the former, if not the latter, and when he returns to the basement Cas hands him a slip of paper with an address on it.

“Let’s go.”

;

The new owner of Roche’s car is some punk-ass kid whose name Dean immediately forgets. He seems way too excited to learn that his car was owned by a serial killer, but Dean bets that his life is pretty boring.

“So, here she is!” The kid flourishes with his arms and then adds, “I did a little painting. Hope that doesn’t get in the way.”  
The paint job is terrible. Dean kind of wants to punch this kid.

“Actually,” he tells him, “this isn’t quite what we were looking for. Is there anything else?”

“Oh, uh, yeah, there was, like, a cover thing. I took it off, but it’s in the yard. I can show it to you if you want.”

“Please,” Cas says before Dean can make any sort of obnoxious comment.

The thing is sitting against the fence. Something is definitely growing on it and Dean hopes that the hearts haven’t been damaged. 

He and Cas flip the thing over and there’s nothing. No hidden compartment, no visible compartment, no helpful note. Dean runs his eyes over the lining a second time and that’s when he spots it. The lining is loose and stretched, but mostly just in one area, like something has been pressing against it for a long time. Dean fishes in knife out of his pocket and ignores the look of reproach Cas gives him, and slits the lining open.

A copy of Alice in Wonderland is lying pressed against the metal of the top. Dean looks over at Cas, and then takes the book gingerly in hand. There had been a little bit of Alice mythology following Roche around; the white car that he had once called his White Rabbit, the Mad Hat thing, though that was recent and the fixation on young children, of course. 

Dean opens it and the pages fall in a natural part and there it is, a cloth heart worn with time but carefully preserved nonetheless. Dean slams the book shut and nods to Cas. They thank the kid, who looks confused but grateful, probably because he didn’t get busted for the weed Dean bets he has hidden in the house.

“Are you going to bring them to him?” Cas asks in the car.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to Skinner, and it’ll depend on how many there are.”

Dean dreads that part most of all. He knows, he is absolutely certain though he has no good reason for it, that there are more than fourteen hearts pressed in the book. If Roche really had been operating for three more years than they had initially thought, the number could be almost anything. If it’s over twenty Dean thinks he might assault Roche anyway, job security be damned. There’s no real reason for twenty being the threshold, but it’s a good round number. 

He should get it over with now, while he’s in the car. That way there’s nowhere he can run, he can get it over with and force himself back into a composed state before going to Skinner with everything. And Cas, Cas will do what Dean needs him to do, whatever that is. Somehow, Cas seems to know.

He opens the book again, to the same heart. Dean flips through the first thirteen faster than he thinks is respectful, but he knows that’s the only way he’ll be able to do it. There’s a fourteenth, and it’s about three-quarters of the way through the book. They aren’t exactly evenly spaced, but it makes Dean nervous all the same. 

Fifteen, he counts. Sixteen.

There are no more, but there is space still, a desire for more, a plan to expand the collection.

They had caught Roche still on the road, in Connecticut, but Dean had never thought about it, if Roche had planned them, long in advance, if he had gone into towns with the sole purpose of looking for victims. How many more hearts had he wanted, Dean wondered.

Roche had called thirteen a “magic number” when he confessed, and it had helped them all to believe that there were only thirteen. What were the other magic numbers? Were they all magic, every single one of those hearts, every little body he left in an unmarked grave?

“How many?” Cas asks, his voice breaking into Dean’s thoughts.

“Two more.”

“So sixteen total.”

“Yeah. I’m just glad it wasn’t higher, given that we fucked up his years of operation so badly.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Cas says, but Dean shakes his head.

“We should have. It should have been the first thing we did once we got him behind bars. Before that we were lazy, just slapped the date of the earliest victim up, but that’s no excuse for not coming back to it later.”

“Stop,” Cas tells him, his voice harsh and commanding. “You did your job, Dean, and you did it well, and you are continuing to do it well. You can’t let Roche get under your skin.

“I know, I know. Skinner’s ready to fire my ass if I let anything like that happen.”

“And it isn’t good for you. I know you feel guilty, but..”

“Cas,” Dean warns.

“No, you’re going to let me finish this. You’ve been terrible to work with since this started, so I’m going to say my piece whether or not you like it.”

Dean grumbles something that he hopes Cas will take as acquiescence. 

“I know you feel guilty,” Cas repeats, “and I don’t know that I have the right to tell you to stop. But you shouldn’t feel guilty about this, not about Roche. The only person at fault here is him. You need to let this go, as hard as it might be.” Cas winds down awkwardly, and drums his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Damn, Cas, that was almost touching.” It’s a weak effort at humor, but both of them chuckle anyway. 

“I am serious, though.”

“I know you are, Cas.”

“Something about this whole situation seems off.”

“Are you talking about the fairy lights again?”

“You don’t need to use that tone of voice. It, what happened to you, what you saw, that isn’t natural. That shouldn’t have happened.”

“Look, maybe I hallucinated it. I think about this case all the goddamn time. Maybe I solved it without realizing it, and made the light up so that everything would make sense.”

“Maybe,” Cas allows. 

“Normally I’d be supportive of all your mumbo-jumbo and wack theories, but now is really not the time, alright?”

“Be careful,” Cas tells him, but lets the subject drop.

Once they’re back at the Bureau Dean steels himself and goes to talk to Skinner. He’s still holding the book in his hands. He doesn’t really want to hand it over to forensics, and there isn’t much they’ll be able to do with scraps of cloth. It feels disrespectful, if he had to put a word to it, to hand this over to the labs, to render this thing—a memento, a strange memoir of horror—a piece of evidence, a plastic-bagged relic that will never see the light of day again.

“Winchester,” Skinner says, once Dean has bullied his way past the secretary. 

“I found the hearts,” Dean says, figures it’s better to cut right to the chase.

“Roche’s hearts?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“When I went to see him, he gave me a hint. Lead me right to them.”

“Where were they?”

“Car. They’re, here, he pressed them in this book.” Dean hands to copy of Alice In Wonderland over the Skinner, who cradles it in his palms.

“So,” Skinner starts. Dean knows where he’s going.

“There are two more that we haven’t found. Sixteen in total. I’m going to talk to Roche as soon as possible.”

“Wait until tomorrow, Winchester.”

“There’s still time today,” Dean insists.

“You should take the time. I know this isn’t easy for you. You’ve clearly been doing good work,” Skinner hefts the book in one hand, “but you should pace yourself. I know you’ll need these to talk to Roche, so I’m going to keep them until tomorrow. You can pick them up in the morning.”

Dean contemplates arguing, but knows this is one argument he isn’t going to win and lets it go with a shrug.

“I’ll be here,” he says, “bright and early.”

;

True to his word, Dean is outside Skinner’s office, not so much waiting as lurking, when the Assistant Director arrives.

“Jesus, Winchester,” Skinner swears after Dean steps out of the corner he had been occupying, “you almost gave me a heart attack.”

Dean does his best not to loom while Skinner unlocks doors and straightens fallen papers and eventual takes the book out of the locked drawer he had placed it in.

“Don’t be stupid,” he tells Dean, and hands it over.

“Me? Stupid? Never.”

Skinner just rolls his eyes and shoos Dean out of his office.

;

Cas lets Dean drive this time, but only because Dean points out that if he’s driving he can’t be staring at the book of hearts, and that is the sort of the thing that can sway Cas, apparently. This does mean that Cas is the one who gets to hold them on the long drive out to the prison. Cas flips through the book once but says nothing about the hearts, and then lays it aside. Dean wonders how Cas manages to keep his composure all the time. It probably has something to do with his Conspiracy, which Cas likes to use as an explanation for anything Dean asks about. 

“What’s your plan?” Cas asks about a third of the way there.

“D’you think I should have one?”

“It would be wise, considering the way Roche is capable of manipulating you.”

Dean scowls. “You have a point. I don’t know. I figure I tell him I found the hearts, but don’t let him have them. He has to tell me where the bodies are, first.”

“You think the hearts will be sufficient leverage.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, “for a couple of reasons. First off, there’s nothing else I could offer that he would want that would be remotely plausible. Secondly, he’s going to want those hearts bad. Killers don’t take trophies just to mess with cops. They might think they do, but on another level, subconsciously, you know, they want them and they want them badly. You’ve gotta be fucked up already to be a serial killer, so.” Dean ends with a shrug.

“No, that makes sense,” Cas tells him. “Are you actually going to give them to him, though?”

“I don’t know. The Bureau might not exactly like that, and that would give me a convenient excuse to screw Roche over.”

“He won’t see that coming?”

“I don’t know,” Dean admits. “I’m hoping that he’ll think he’s got me really shaken up, enough that I’d give him what he wants.” 

Cas raises his eyebrows, but lets that pass without comment. Dean is grateful for that. He knows it’s a stupid and dangerous plan but he doesn’t really know what else to do with Roche. Men like him, in general, are hard to talk to and harder to manipulate.

They don’t talk about the case for the rest of the drive. Instead, Dean ribs Cas about the copy of the National Enquirer he found on Cas’s desk. Cas insists that it gets some things right, but after a lot of prodding, he admits that “some” means more like “one thing, and Cas doesn’t have any concrete proof anyway.”

Cas pretends to sulk (Dean knows he isn’t actually upset because he is making a facial expression) until they reach the prison, when they both snap into serious agent mode. 

As they’re checking in with security and dropping off their weapons Cas whispers to Dean, “I have to go, I’m sorry. Go in without me, but don’t do anything stupid.”

He’s gone before Dean can ask him what he has to do. The guard takes him to where Roche is waiting, sitting at a table, his elbows resting on it, looking up at Dean with the ghost of a smile on his face.

“Dean, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

Dean smiles with too many teeth. “I’ve just got a few questions for you, Roche, and then you can get back to rotting away in here.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s all that bad,” Roche says, “but ask away. I’m all yours.”

“Where are the last two?”

“So you found my hearts,” Roche says, delighted. 

“Yeah. Great hiding place, really clever.”

“Well,” Roche says, leaning forward across the table. Dean scoots back reflexively. “I’ll make you a deal.”

“Are you really in a position to be making deals?”

“I think I am. I heard you found little Emily, from 1993. But when I was on trial, if I remember correctly, you said I started my work in 1996.”

Dean freezes.

“Did you know that before I handled the Northeast, I worked in the Midwest?” Roche asks. He’s leaning back now, tilting his chair on two legs and looking at Dean over steepled fingers.

No, Dean didn’t know that. They hadn’t checked, and it seems ludicrous now, but everything had seemed so simple when they had finally caught up to Roche in Pennsylvania. They had thirteen bodies with the same m.o. and Roche had eventually confessed and even though he gave Dean a thorough mindfucking on the way there, everyone patted themselves on the back and said good job. 

Taking Dean’s silence for a “no”, Roche continues. “Well, I did. It’s a much harder region, you know. Much more spread out than New England, boring scenery and, in a lot of places, fewer people. I worked there in the late eighties and early, early nineties, before I got moved to the Northeast.”

“Fascinating,” Dean says. Underneath the table his hands are clenched. He thinks he knows where Roche is going with this, but he can’t believe it.

“I still remember all the places I visited, you know. Illinois and Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska, and that is a boring place to drive through, let me tell you. So are the Dakotas. It’s just so flat out there. Nothing at all like up here,” Roche waves his hand. “I even got down a little further south. All the way to Missouri, and it’s different there. They have the accent and everything. And I made it over to Kansas, too.”

Dean can’t talk, can’t let himself move, can barely even breathe. He has never wanted to kill anyone more than this man.

“You’re from Kansas, aren’t you, Dean?”

“Lawrence,” Dean grinds out.

“A lovely place. I was there for a bit, you know.”

“Were you?”

“Oh yes.” Roche smiles, and lets his chair fall forward. “I think you and I both know where this is headed, Dean.”

Dean doesn’t dignify that with a response.

“So I’ll repeat myself: I’m going to make a deal with you.”

“What do you want?”

“I want my hearts. All of them.”

“And what are you going to give me?”

“Well,” Roche smiles, “I’ll let you pick which one I’m going to lead you to.”

“You think I’m going to let you out of this place?”

“I don’t really see how you have a choice. I’m certainly not going to tell you anything as long as I’m still here.”

“I don’t think we need your help that badly, Roche.”

“Are you sure? I know you must have some questions. No your superiors, Dean. You.”

“Oh?”

“Please, Dean, don’t play stupid with me. We both know you’re not. It’s okay to say it out loud. I already know what you want to ask.”

“Then say it yourself,” Dean growls.

“Alright. You want to know if I really did kill your little brother.”

Hearing it out loud punches the air from Dean’s lungs. “Nice try, Roche, but I did work this case. I know you went after little girls.”

“As far as you know,” Roche concedes. “But this was very early on, you know. And Sam was such an adorable child.”

That’s it.

Roche is sprawled out on the floor with his chair tipped over beside him before Dean can think. His hand throbs gently from the impact with the hard bones of Roche’s face. He’s breathing hard. He can barely see. It feels like his head is going to constrict until it explodes. 

Dean doesn’t wait for Roche to say anything else. If he stays any longer a guard will come in—they had to have heard the noise—and Dean absolutely cannot have that happen. 

He walks out of the prison without looking at the guard at the desk. Cas isn’t anywhere in sight and Dean contemplates leaving him, but realizes that will look suspicious. 

Instead, he sits on the hood of the car and tries to blank out his mind. Thinking about Roche, about what he said, about Sam and terrible things that could happen to him and that undoubtedly did—Dean is a deeply rational person underneath it all and so he knows, of course he knows, that Sam is lost to him (was taken from him) forever, no matter how many times he tells himself that there’s hope—makes Dean’s vision blur and his heart start racing. 

Out of the corner of his eye he sees two men talking, standing too far apart to really be friends. Dean knows that distance. It’s the safe distance, the one you use with informants. One of them is even wearing a trench coat, which only adds to the spy effect, and then Dean realizes that he’s watching Cas. 

He has no idea who the other man is. He’s small, shorter than Cas by a few inches and his face has a smirk on it that looks permanent, unless his super secret conversation necessitates a lot of smirking. Dean is pretty sure super secret conversations involve more pursed lips and meaningful glances to the side than smirking, but what does he know. 

The other guy moves away after five minutes, and Dean tries to look casual as Cas heads towards the car. This probably isn’t any of his business, except that he keeps getting warnings about Cas and Cas’s people, so this shit is becoming his business. 

“That didn’t take long,” Cas says by way of greeting.

“Uh, about that,” Dean says. “Let’s just start driving and I’ll explain on the way.”

“I look forward to it,” Cas tells him with a smirk.

Dean waits until they’re ten miles out to start. He stares fixedly at the road, licks his lips, and says, “So Roche and I never reached an agreement.”

Cas doesn’t say anything. Dean is pretty sure one of his eyebrows is raised, but he’s too nervous to check.

“I may have,” he says, but then stops. The word he should use here is “overreacted” but Dean doesn’t think he overreacted. If anything, he didn’t react violently enough. He should have beaten Roche into a bloody pulp, killed him.

“I may have done something that will make Skinner angry.”

“Dean.”

“To be fair, Roche provoked me.”

“Dean,” Cas says again. His tone is a warning that Dean won’t heed.

“He had it coming,” Dean says, “and probably deserved worse. Scratch that, definitely deserved worse.”

“Dean!” Cas yells, slamming his hand on the dash. “What did you do?”

“In legal terms I’m pretty sure is classifies as, uh, assault. But I just punched him in the face. No one saw. He might have enjoyed it, actually. I hope he didn’t.”

“God damn it, Dean.” Cas doesn’t sound angry, just tired.

“I couldn’t stop myself, Cas. It happened before I even realized it. I was just so angry. He was, he had been saying, about Sam, that it was him…” Dean trails off. He knows he’s being inarticulate, but Cas is smart enough to put the pieces together and Dean doesn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“It doesn’t fit the pattern,” Cas says. Of course, now would be the time for Cas’s robotic side to surface.

“No, but now we know his years of operation are wider than we thought, so it isn’t off the table.”

“He was just trying to provoke you, you know.”

“But I don’t, Cas. Maybe he was, maybe I gave him exactly what he wanted.”

“Skinner’s going to take you off the case,” Cas tells him.

“If he finds out,” Dean counters, “and I’m hoping he won’t. There’s a chance Roche won’t tell anyone, and no one noticed. He’ll want me to come back.”

“Obviously,” Cas agrees. “He wants something.”

“The hearts, at least. Probably something else, too.”

“And you’re going to give it to him, aren’t you?”

“I can’t, Cas, I can’t help it. I have to know.”

“He could lie. He will lie,” Cas says, “if he thinks he can get something out of it.”

“It’s a chance I have to take. If I could know, once and for, if Sam—“

“Dean,” Cas says, and places one hand on Dean’s arm. 

“Cas, please, don’t tell Skinner. Just, you can supervise me or whatever the fuck you need to do to feel okay about this, but let me, just, let me have this chance.”

He finally turns to look at Cas as he says this, and Cas is staring back at him. His eyes are soft and his mouth is pulled down at the corners. 

“Be careful,” Cas says, and Dean knows it’s as close to a blessing as he will get.

;

Skinner doesn’t find out. Dean is, frankly, shocked.

He buys Dean’s excuse, that Roche was trying to toy with Dean and Dean needed to get away before he lost his cool. There’s a warning glance, but nothing else, and he and Cas are authorized to go visit Roche again.

“I’ll come with you this time,” Cas says as they pull up to the prison.

“No more sketchy looking informants to meet?” The question is out of Dean’s mouth before he can stop it, and Cas jerks as though Dean has just pushed him.

To his credit, Cas doesn’t try to deny anything, but he shoots Dean a vicious glare as they turn in their guns and are escorted back to see Roche.

He is sitting as he always sits, and there are no guards. He must not have told anyone, Dean realizes, and then wonders why. He must think he can get something out of Dean. He has to be playing a long-term game, here, or he would have had Dean’s ass off the case and on probation within fifteen minutes of Dena’s leaving the prison. It makes him nervous. Dean knows Cas is right to distrust Roche, but Roche is a slippery character. He’s a psychopathic child-murdering monster, and his motives are something no normal person, not even one like Cas, could possibly understand.

Dean sits across from Roche and Cas stands behind his right shoulder. 

“Maybe the angel on your shoulder will help you keep your temper, Dean,” Roche says once they’re settled. Dean tenses, but Cas places a firm hand on his shoulder and Dean relaxes back against the chair.

“Let’s try this again, Roche, but with less bullshit. Think you can handle that?”

“Do you think I was bullshitting you?”

Roche is giving Dean his best Cheshire Cat grin and Dean wants to wipe it off of his face. This is what Roche wants, he reminds himself, he wants you to play his game.

“Let’s talk about the hearts again.”

“Ah, yes. You did tell me you’d found them. I wish I could see them again.”

“It’s possible that you could,” Dean tells him. Cas’s hand is still on his shoulder. 

“But I’d have to do something for you,” Roche says.

“How else did you think this was going to work?”

“What do you want, Dean?”

It’s a perfect normal question. Really, it’s the exact question that anyone in Roche’s position would be asking, but in his mouth the words become different. Roche sounds as though he is the one holding all the cards. It’s possible that he does. Dean feels powerless in front of him, despite having Cas and the Bureau behind him.

“We want,” and it’s important for him here to say we, because this is not just Dean’s will but the will of the entire FBI, “we want you to tell us where the last two are. We’ll show you the hearts that aren’t matched to victims, and you’ll tell us where you buried them.”

“No,” Roche says. “I don’t think that’s what I want to do, but I’ll make you a counteroffer.”

“The Bureau doesn’t take counteroffers from convicted murderers,” Cas says from behind Dean.

“You’re probably right, Castiel, but I think Dean might make a personal exception for me.”

Cas tightens his grip on Dean’s shoulder as a warning, but Dean already knows what he’s going to say.

“Let’s hear it, Roche. Tell me what you’ve got.”

“I knew you’d be a little more understanding than your coworkers,” Roche simpers. “And I think you’ll really like this deal.”

Dean raises an eyebrow and gestures for Roche to continue.

“You bring me the hearts, and you show me the two you’re missing, just like you said, but here’s where I’m going to change things up. You get to pick one of the hearts, only one, and I’ll tell you where the body is.”

“No,” Dean says, “that’s ridiculous.”

“It’s either that, or nothing. You can’t force me to help you.”

“You really wanna bet on that?”

Roche’s glance flickers over to Cas for a moment. “I do, Dean. I’m safer in here than you realize.”

“And what makes this deal so damn good that I’ll take it despite it being against protocol?”

“It’s the only way I’ll agree to help you at all,” Roche says, “and you’ve got a fifty-fifty shot at finally finding your brother.”

Cas’s fingers dig into his shoulder too hard; Dean is definitely going to have bruises there tomorrow. 

“Is that a confession, Roche?” Dean’s voice surprises him with its steadiness. Having Cas behind him, having Cas here to watch and to get angry for Dean and to remind him that a world exists outside of this room has grounded him. This is the most clear-headed Dean has every felt while thinking about or dealing with or even just being reminded that Roche exists.

“I think we both know you won’t believe me until you see the body, so you’d better pick the right heart.”

Dean remembers exactly what Sam had been wearing the day he disappeared. A striped shirt; blue and white and red and faded with age He can’t remember the patterns on the unsolved hearts. He likes to think he would have recognized the fabric from Sam’s clothing, but dirt and time have a way of obscuring things. If he had missed it, if that had been some piece of Sam that he’d been carrying around with him and he hadn’t even realized—

“So,” Roche breaks into his thoughts, “what do you think, Dean?”

“I think you’re treading on thin ice, Roche.”

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Roche smirks. “Unless, of course, the angel has any objections.”

Cas’s grip abruptly goes slack, and Dean can hear his breath rasp. 

Neither Cas nor Roche says anything for what feels like an eternity. Cas eventually says something that Dean and Roche take as a “no”, and then Cas is hustling Dean out of the prison.

“You are an idiot,” he hisses as soon as no one else is nearby, halfway across the parking lot.

“What the fuck was I supposed to do, Cas? Let him off the hook? We need him for this, as much as I hate to admit it.”

“This is, he’s not, god damnit it, Dean. He’s playing you and you know it and you’re letting him!”

“Fuck you,” Dean mutters, low enough that he hopes Cas can’t hear him.

Cas stops just feet from the car and stares at Dean. His eyes are unfairly blue.

“I’m trying to do what’s best for you,” Cas tells him.

“You’re not my mother,” Dean spits, “and keeping me in the dark about sixty percent of the time doesn’t really seem like the sort of thing you do when you’re trying to help someone.”

“You have to trust me,” Cas insists, and maybe if Dean didn’t feel like his blood was boiling he would listen. As it is, the time for listening is over.

“Well, Cas, I can’t. Roche may be trying to play me, but so are you. I’m not stupid.” Dean wrenches the door open and sits down behind the wheel. He would leave Cas behind but the thought of having to explain this whole clusterfuck to Skinner makes him wait. He wonders what Cas is doing, if he’s just standing and looking at the place that Dean used to be, or if he’s calling one of his shady friends to handle this situation or if he’s waiting for Dean to leave him behind. Dean doesn’t look, though it takes an enormous amount of willpower.

Cas slides into the passenger seat, finally, and Dean speeds out of the parking lot.

“I thought,” Cas starts, but Dean interrupts him.

“Don’t.”

“No, you’re going to listen to me,” Cas says. His voice has dropped roughly an octave, or so it sounds to Dean, and he seems to have replaced his vocal cords with gravel while Dean wasn’t looking. “These people will ruin your life, Dean. They won’t kill you, at least not a first, but they will make you wish you were dead. They are absolutely ruthless and without any sort of compassion, and you are on their radar now. I’m trying to get you off of it.”

“So they’re monsters, but you ran around with them anyway?”

“I was young, and I was stupid, and they made a pretty convincing argument.”

Dean has no answer to that. Cas, broken perhaps by the silence, doesn’t continue, and they sit in silence until they reach the Bureau. Dean waits until Cas is out of the car and into the building before he checks the back seat to make sure the hearts are still there, and heads back to see Roche.

;

It’s a fucking terrible drive, and by the time Dean is back at the prison and probably getting judged by the guards for making so many visits in such a short time, his bad mood has gotten even worse.

Roche is already smirking when Dean sees him, and that tips the scales somehow. Dean’s anger mounts and mounts and the crashes down into total nothingness. When he sits across from Roche he’s completely calm and he can see that Roche is unsettled by this.

“I’ll take your deal,” Dean says. “Here are the hearts.”

“Ah, but which one have you chosen? Which little body are we going to uncover?”

“Sam’s,” Dean answers. “I want you to take me to Sam’s body.”

“You have to pick one of the hearts, Dean. You know I can’t make it that easy for you.”

“Worth a shot, wasn’t it?”

Roche shrugs and pushes the hearts back over to Dean. The two unidentified hearts are the last in the little scrapbook that forensics had put together to house the hearts, and Dean picks one at random. Roche raises his eyebrows but only nods.

“You’re going to have to let me out for this to work, you know.”

“I’m not stupid,” Dean tells him, “the Bureau has known that for a while.”

“Shall we be off, then? Or would you like to wait for the angel on your shoulder?”

“I’d rather not have any good influences on this trip. You’d agree, wouldn’t you?”

Roche laughs at that, a full-bodied sound that astonishes Dean. “Of course, of course. let’s be on our way.”

;

When they arrive at the airport, Dean finally asks Roche where they’re headed. He thinks he already knows the answer but he has to hear it, straight form the horse’s mouth. Roche isn’t looking at him when he answers, but at the middle distance, and the smile on his face is strange.

“Kansas.”

;

They fly into Lawrence. Roche says it’s the closest a plane will be able to get them. As soon as they step off the plane Dean can feel something settle into his bones, a cold, quiet knowledge that this is the end.

Sam is buried somewhere in the hot, flat plains of this state, and Dean is going to find him, and then he is going to kill the man who did this. He should probably have some sort of moral issue with killing in cold blood, but Dean has a very different moral compass than most men, inherited from his father. 

His job might very well be forfeit, given his previous track record with Roche, but Dean once again can’t bring himself to be concerned. The promise of closure overrides and outweighs everything else that could possibly happen to him, and that is the thought Dean keeps with him as Roche directs him out of the city. 

They pass by Dean’s neighborhood and Roche’s eyes flicker over to him. Roche knows, Dean thinks, and that is almost proof enough. Dean has never told anyone about his life in Kansas, and for Roche to know this place…

They finally stop about forty-five minutes out from Dean’s old house. There isn’t much natural cover; Roche must have buried the body at night. No, not “the body”, Sam’s body. Roche must have buried Dean’s little brother out here in the dead of night. Roche leads Dean about half a mile away from the road and then points. There isn’t anything remarkable about the patch of earth he picks out, but Dean knows that it’s the right spot. He can feel it. He takes the shovel form Roche and starts to dig. Roche looks surprised, as though he genuinely thought Dean would allow him to dig up Sam’s body, as though he would ever have that right. 

He doesn’t have to dig far, Roche isn’t a strong man and even in his youth probably wasn’t the kind to dig too deep or waste too much time on something like this. He remembers the feel of bone under his hand from the last time, and if he could feel anything, which he still can’t—he wonders if this is what a psychotic break is like—he would be sick, or throttle Roche. Both are on his to-do list, and he’ll get to them eventually.

Dean lays the bones out next to the grave, doesn’t look at them until the work is done, and then there they are, these sweet relics so dearly beloved and lost to him for so long. He knows the shirt that still clings to them, the faded colors and the awkward fit. Dean knows his brother down to his bones. 

He kneels there in the hot Kansas dirt and waits as though for an ax to fall. In the distance he thinks he hears someone call his name. It sounds like Cas, but that can’t be. Dean left everything behind.

This is Roche’s chance to run, he thinks, but he hears no footsteps. Good, he supposes, if Roche were to run it would create problems.

His face is damp but it isn’t raining, and it takes a long time for Dean to realize he’s crying.


End file.
